This is my Galimoto. When you push– the legs pedal. Side by side with the world’s most expensive and popular toys, my Galimoto will win the favor of children every single time.
This particular one is made from coat hangers and cloth that were rescued from dumps, cleaned, and donated to organizations that employ small businesses in developing countries, under the banner of fair trade. He was manufactured in a country where my aunt lives, where she runs her own business thanks to micro-loans and the protection of fair trade commerce.
When this was sent to me, it was accompanied by a note:
“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”
– Arthur Ashe
This time of year, I think a lot about my little bicycle toy.
It’s easy to fall into the hype of a New Year. Everyone wants to start with a bang! They want to see results in moments, or they wait to start until they’re at the starting place. The calendar rolls over and it’s as if a clock starts ticking downwards. Every mistake seems of legendary proportions, and every delay seems like a sign from the universe that perhaps you’ll never achieve the big dream.
But the truth is: a beginning is just place in your own mind. It’s a way of looking at things: a perspective. No one else needs to understand, and there is no specific way it should look. Beginnings don’t have to be glamorous. Which is good, because they so rarely are. My little Galimoto had a fairly un-glamorous beginning, but look at him now!
He bicycles with the power of the thousands (yes, thousands) of children who have loved him.
Sometimes, a beginning is just a girl picking up a metal hanger and thinking of her cornstalk childhood toys. That girl doesn’t have an education– of any sort. She trades days of seamstress and cleaning services to win over the help of someone who can read and write– two skills she never even thought she was capable of learning. She walks into a local bank with her helper, and asks to be part of the programs that can fund a better life for the girls of her city.
In the moment, it doesn’t look like a beginning and it’s certainly not glamorous. It’s downright gross, picking things out of trash and learning to clean them by first world country standards. People laugh, and give her the nickname of the cleaning solution she is required to use in order to sell her wares because she always smells of it. The change affected seems minimal at best.
But you do what you can.
You use what you have.
You start where you are.
Because one day, from the vantage of hindsight– you might be like the girl in the story, my auntie. You might be reading about your newest recycled design in an American publication, as you do payroll for the hundreds of college-minded women from your community that you employ. Everyone in your family reads and writes now, and no one dies at work. Perhaps everyone still calls you by that nickname, but now you see it as a badge of pride.
Despite the lack of fireworks and the absence of glamor– you see your beginning, and it is glorious.
Simply because you started.
May you always have a new beginning to celebrate, glamorous or not, and may you always push forward with love, just like my little Galimoto.
Good luck in your dreams, goals, and resolutions!
http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2014/01/03/photo-challenge-beginning/