Throughout my life, I have always been able to handle everything with ease. During my childhood, there were very few times where life became truly difficult, and even then, I always had my parents to guide me. I shrugged these situations off because things remained easy, and I continued on with my life as if nothing happened. I kept multitasking and trying to do everything at once. However, my parents began to tell me that I shouldn’t try to take “big bites out of life”. Me being a child, I never listened to them. As I grew older, I began to gain independence and responsibility. It became increasingly more difficult to do everything at once. At this point, I finally started to listen to my parents. I realized that they might have had a point. Now, I believe that life should be taken bit by bit.
A couple of summers ago, I went to Costa Rica for two weeks. The point of this trip was to experience and appreciate the tropical rainforest and all of its inhabitants. The third day of the trip, our group went on a hike across the Osa Peninsula. This hike was roughly 20 miles long and it lasted about 13 hours. It was extremely long and strenuous. Not even 4 hours into the hike, I started to have an asthma attack, and then I began to panic. Our group leader told everyone to rest for a minute while he talked to me. He asked me to breathe deeply and after about a minute, I calmed down. I told him that I didn’t know if I could make it through the rest of the hike and that I was scared of trying to move forward. His response was asking me if I could make it another 20 feet. I said that I could easily make it another 20 feet. He then asked if I could make it another 30 feet past that, and I said yes. He told me to think like that for the rest of the hike and it would be much easier to reach the end destination.
After we continued the hike, I began to think back to what my parents had always told me about life, and how trying to do everything at once makes life more difficult. Instead of thinking about 15 miles until the hike was over, I thought about making it until the our next break. By continuing this method of thinking, I was able to calmly continue. By taking the hike one step at a time, I was able to both make it through the hike more easily and I even enjoyed the beauty of nature. I was able to see countless species of plants and hear the cries of exotic animals. I heard the flowing rivers and the wings of birds. I knew then that life would became much easier with this new method of thinking. At the end of the hike, I was genuinely sad that I could no longer be in the middle of the beautiful forest, which told me that thinking “in the moment” was the better way to live.
All in all, my parents were always right. Since that hike, I realized that trying to do everything at once just complicated all of my tasks. I knew then that thinking about the big picture too often would just stress me out. I started taking things in small chunks rather than large ones, and I even began to enjoy life more this way. I started to take things in life bit by bit, and it has helped me grow into the man I am today, and I have my parents to thank for that.
