Keep it out of the Ditch

I love love love riding my bicycle.  Now that my little guy is getting older, he's four, we can go together and we're getting speedier.  The other day we were riding and he kept going over an area on the pavement that was uneven and he would catch it just so and his training wheels would get stuck there, so he would be peddling and his tire would be spinning instead of moving him forward.  He would fuss and whine and want me to push him out of the rut, rather than putting his feet on the ground and getting himself out of his predicament, which I did  a couple of times and then decided he needed to do it himself.

Finally, after many times rolling over that area and getting stuck, mind you the area he kept getting stuck in was about 2 feet wide and we had an area about the size of a football field to ride on; I said to him, "Honey, why don't you stop driving your bike into the ditch, and then you won't get stuck."  To which he said, "oh, okay," and he did.  Problem solved.  I thought, you know that could apply to so many things in our lives, couldn't it?  

How many times do we keep going over the same area, which gets us "stuck," when we have so much other ground we could cover?  How many times do we sit and spin our wheels and complain, when it's us that keeps getting us stuck in that same spot over and over again?  Why do we keep doing that?  I've heard the saying, and maybe you have too, "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting to have a different outcome."  I'm guilty of that, how about you?  Then, after I casually suggested to my son that he go a different way, he did and never got stuck again the whole time we were riding.  And I could tell by his response that he hadn't thought of that solution at all, until I mentioned it.  He is super intelligent, and I know it's not that he couldn't have, he can figure out how things work and makes connections that astonish me all the time; he simply oozes common sense.  I love that about him.  His little eyes were just shut to this notion before I said it, he just simply couldn't see it.  Again, I'm reminded of the implications that could have in real life.  Sometimes we can't see our own solutions, even when they are as simple and plain as the nose on our faces, unfortunately sometimes this leads to choices with severe consequences also.