Back in the Day

When I was a child I was, well, a lot younger. During my first two years in grade school I had to walk more than a mile to school. All of the grade school kids would gather and make the trek together. We usually took the same route, but on occasion we would mix it up. I don’t recall if we did it for the adventure or for some lesser reason.

To a six-year-old, a mile is a long way. Assuming each stride covered a foot, I had to take at least 5,280 steps each way. On a nice spring morning, such a walk could be fun, particularly when we would stop at the gas station to buy candy. But in the dead of winter, plodding through snow and ice was hardly the most enjoyable way to start the day.

But that walk was a necessary step in reaching my destination. It was a mundane chore, but without it, I would not have learned the alphabet or how to add. Nor would I have met Sharon Johnson, but that’s a different story.

Building a successful painting business often requires long, tedious walks through snow and ice. Sometimes that journey is painfully slow and boring. Sometimes it seems we will never get to our destination.

As a child I learned that even the longest journey can be completed if I simply took step after step. I knew where I was going and how to get there. I learned that if I kept putting one foot in front of the other, and repeated that process long enough, I would eventually get to school.

At the end of second grade our neighborhood got a school bus. And I learned another lesson. The bus got us to school much quicker, and in the winter I didn’t need to freeze my butt off. But the journey was seldom as exciting as when we walked to school. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that we could never convince the bus driver to stop at the gas station so we could buy some candy. Or, perhaps it was the fact that the journey no longer required any effort on my part.

Sometimes the journey is as much fun as reaching the destination. Sometimes the journey is its own reward.

© BEP Enterprises Incorporated 2008