Find the Rhythm.

The definition of Paradigm:
“a set of forms all of which contain a particular element,
esp. the set of all inflected forms based on a single stem or theme.”

Third grade, all I wanted was a uniform. My mom signed me up to play co-ed baseball with some construed hopes that I might finally have found my athletic talent. The problem was, I was just the biggest poser there might ever be in a little league game. I was taller, bigger, and had a pretty legit sky blue uniform, the only thing missing was the ability to swing, catch and throw.

It did not take long for me to fully understand the danger of throwing oneself under a ball just to catch it; this meant that there was always a risk of extreme pain by a leather round object catapulted at your face, making some type of bruising contact. No Thanks.

So it would only make sense for me to join an intramural softball team at the age of twenty-one and head out in my North Face hat and Nike kicks ready to try again. However, anytime a spec of white would whiz in my direction, I dodged as though that was the point and I was the high scorer. So of course it would only make sense for the only inning that I sat out to be when my roommate chose to run at me full speed, leap through the air and proceed to knee me directly in the crown of my head.

Contact sports (for me this is anything that involves the throwing/catching/kicking a ball) have only brought about serious injuries. Why is it that I feel leagues safer biking down a highway, hiking mountains, or kayaking?

I have deciding that each of us is designed with a certain rhythm. This is why some individuals can step up to a plate, swing, smack, run, score. While I on the other hand feel much more confident falling into the steady motion of bike pedals, pumping legs on an upward climb, or the churning of a paddle through silent waters.

We gravitate to what is natural, whether that is in sports, art, music, dancing, writing, mathematic equations or just good conversations.

So a paradigm: These are all drastically differentiating elements, yet they all stem from one thing:

rhythm.

Alpinista....

Be Thou My Vision
"Riches I heed not,
nor man’s empty praise,
Thou mine Inheritance, now and always:
Thou and Thou only, first in my heart,
High King of Heaven, my Treasure Thou art."

What a picturesque song. A loving psalm.

Alpinista is the Spanish word for mountain climber. I have been mulling over bike naming options for the last few months and as I rode yesterday decided that whatever the name, it must represent my struggle. I have a goal to bike a canyon in Northern Colorado this summer and I am aware that to many this may be a menial task.

I have come to realize how much I romanticize adventure. In my head, struggle is cancelled out by the idea of accomplishment. If this is truth then I am most certainly a failure. I have faced life with fear as my armor, protecting me from reaching any goal. An incomplete climb of a class five fourteener as been sneering at me for the last seven months.

In the book "Three Cups of Tea" Greg Mortenson comments on the westernized ideology of success being based on reaching the summit, where the eastern world celebrates beauty and the journey. This is what I have forgotten; my mind is so encased by my own lacking that I am frozen. But isn't this the point? Where is my vision? Certainly as long as I view my life with a big letter F I can do no good for anybody.

I need to seek my own individualistic journey, modeled after the only one who will never fail me. My Boet, my papa.

A Wise thought:
Comparison is the Thief of Joy. -Randa B.

Spring:
to be released from a constrained position, as by resilient or elastic force or from the action of a spring