Life Advice

(Photo: seeveeaar)

A very wise man once said “There’s a difference between knowing the path, and walking the path.“; that man is Morpheus, the trench coat sporting bald man from The Matrix. Though he isn’t real, that quote has always stuck with me. In part because I watched the movie more than 11 times in theaters, but mostly because I’ve found it to be a truism. We may know that doing a particular action would be a good idea, but we tend to avoid the things that scare us, or that we believe may cause us embarrassment.  The things that we most fear doing are usually exactly what we should be doing.

I recently spent an afternoon trying out an activity that I had been humming and hawing about for months; downhill mountain biking. It’s something I had been wanting to do for ages, and though the conditions were perfect for it, I kept finding convenient ways to put it off. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the idea of it–quite the contrary, I loved biking as a teenager–what worried me was that