As my daughter rolls through her fifth year, I took it upon myself to initiate a timeworn tradition. I removed the stabilisers from her bicycle, determined to teach her to cycle without any assistance, just as my father taught me. It’s an anxious spectacle, not dissimilar to our avian friends perhaps, gently pushing our chicks closer to the precipice and encouraging them to fly.
Like any child learning a new skill, she struggled on her first day. The bicycle wobbled, the handlebars veered off in the wrong direction and her confidence was tested.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
“What’s a Rome?” she asked.
“It’s a city,” I said. “It took hundreds of years to build. It takes time to learn how to ride a bike too.”
“But will it take hundreds of years like Rome?”
The idiom I’d inadvertently introduced to our training session, which quickly derailed into an anxious exchange on the relativity
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