Contents
The story of the girl and the pink bicycle that will change the way you speak to others
Psychology
Why don’t you “stop asking for what you don’t want”? I invite you to read this daily story that may bring you closer to a new way of looking at the world
«Sunday, a river, a father, a daughter and a pink bicycle. These are the main elements of the story. It is important to clarify that the river is the old bed of Valencia, which we Valencians continue to call asía although, instead of water and fish, it is full of sun and people ‘doing things’. Our river is like the English Court of activities, depending on the section it has everything: bars, athletics track, baseball, rugby, petanque, skate, etc.
The fact is that walking along the river is like getting into a television series, you see small scenes continuously. And among all of them, one particularly caught my attention. First for the colors: he, male of about 45 years dressed to run like someone who dresses for a war. It did not lack detail, the problem is that every detail was phosphor green and thus it is impossible to stop attracting attention. He was accompanied by her. A girl – her daughter, probably – dressed head to toe in pink. She was riding a bicycle. Also pink.
They attracted attention because almost certainly that day would be one of the first days when that four or five-year-old girl accompanied her father to run on a bike without wheels. And they attracted attention because the girl had a hard time keeping her balance and the father had a hard time maintaining patience because his daughter kept bumping into him over and over again.
The fact is that what struck me the most was not that image, but what the father said to his daughter: “Stop hitting me with the handlebar”. Poor father, who would surely come home full of bruises, but also a poor girl, who probably after that sentence not only did not learn to ride a bike better, but almost certainly felt worse.
Everything would have been very different if that father, instead of asking his daughter to stop doing what she didn’t want to do (“stop hitting me with the handlebar”), had given her a hint to stop doing it and to learn to ride a bike better. For example, something like “honey, hold the handlebar firmly and try to go straight.”
It seems silly but it is not. There is a phrase that I love: “Butterflies cannot see their wings”, and it is that we all help to build the identity of others. And this father with that phrase did not help a little to give security to his daughter.
And we all have that power and we forget it. We find it easier to judge, “You don’t do it right”, what to guide: «To make it better try this».
And it is that what that father did without wanting to do it very often without knowing. We do it when we are driving and we ask the driver not to run rather than slow down or someone who speaks loudly not to yell rather than speak more quietly. Which would be the equivalent of going to a restaurant and asking the waiter not to bring us what we do not want by reciting all those dishes one by one and without asking only the one we do want.
Sounds ridiculous, right? Well we do. The good news is that with a little attention we can stop doing it.