The stoics believe that every obstacle can be turned around into an opportunity to learn and exercise excellence. The key in doing so is changing your mindset. Instead of reacting and telling yourself and others why this sucks and how you’ll never reach your goal now tell yourself ‘Wonderfull, now I can prove how badly I want this’
To illustrate this I feel like writing about my biking trip last summer. The idea was to cycle +-1000 km in 1 week, reaching the top of the Mount Ventoux, starting from Brussels, with just a bag and bike.
After months of preparation I was finally set. And so I left, it was 7am on the 15th of July. So at around 7:02 I fell, knees open. It hurt but whatever, let’s keep going. At 10:00 I was about to reach the first big city and then boom, first flat tire. That’s fine, I was prepared. Ah wait, the store gave me incompatible tubes. So had to walk 10 km before finding a bike store and lost about 4 hours doing so. At night I managed to arrive somehow in Luxembourg, where a friend was waiting for me. It was 2am. Hoped I could rest but hell no. 40°C fever and hallucinations so you could forget about that. My friend advised. me to take the train back home but there was no stopping me. I rested for a day and the day afterwards I continued my road to Nancy. When reaching a small hotel I literally shit in my pants, turned out I wasn’t healed after all. So there I stayed for 3 nights, feeling like crap. A sample showed that my stomach got inflamed by an excess of chlorella powder. During those 3 days all that came to my mind was how I’d continue my road once getting better. After 3 days I took my bike and followed my path, now it mas 40°C outside. It was hell. I went trough a small path where I eventually fell in half dried mud. Lost my biking glasses, my pedal broke and there I lay, in this god forsaken place. And you know what? I was laughing. I was smiling and I was happy because I knew that whatever would happen, I’d keep going forward until finally reaching my destination. That was one of the most wonderful moments in my life.
Now I'm curious to find out about which experiences you had in the past, where you kept going forward, whatever happened, until you finally reached your goal and how did that feel?
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