We all have events that make us who we are, but they don’t have to be life and death experiences. It’s what we take from them that lets us grow.
When my daughter was very young, she came home from school with a picture she had drawn.
She told me that the assignment was to draw their favorite thing to do.
Excited; I asked her what she drew.
She looked at me with the sweetest little eyes and told me that her favorite thing to do was to spend time with Dad.
At this point, my eyes began to sweat just a little.
I asked her if I could see the picture.
As soon as I saw it, my heart was ripped from my chest, and everything I thought I was as a father was crushed in a moment.
The world swooned and I had to sit down.
In the picture was an adorable small red headed girl sitting on the couch, watching TV; while her dad sat next to her on the couch – with his laptop.
There is nothing like truth from a child to slap you awake. I trend towards over working. Far too much to be a good father. I did not know how to separate the different parts of my life, but I made a change that day.
Whenever I drift too far towards my obsession with work for too long. I remember that picture and I sit down and give those that I love my undivided attention in the moment.
When I was in high school cross country I had a nagging stress fracture in my right foot. During a home school race one afternoon we had a ravine just 200 meters into the race. I leapt from one side and landed on the other side with my right foot and felt the bone snap like a dry twig. Pain shot up my leg and my vision flashed white for a moment. The adrenaline that course through a young man’s veins at the beginning of a competition is amazing. As humans, we have evolved to fight, to survive, to continue at all costs and deal with small problems later. My memoentum carying me forward, there was no stopping. By the time my other foot hit the ground, the endorphines had kicked in and begun to numb the pain. I ran on. These were 5k races, and I had most of the race ahead of me. I had been raised to never quit. The pain of quiting the race would have hurt more that thepain in my foot. In time, I settled into a gait that allowed me to run with minor sharp pain. IT was only those downhill, sharp right turns, where I had to pivot on my broken foot that made me grimace in pain. As I felt the bones grinding together in my foot, I know it was a bad idea to keep moving. But I did not know how to stop. I finished the race in a much lower position than my normal race, and one of my teammates made a snide comment so I flipped him off. My coach tore into me for my bad sportsmanship and I looked him in the eye and told him my foot was broken. His face went white, and he sent me to see if the school physical therapists where still there. As I drove home that night, learning how to drive with a broken foot, the pain of knowing that I was out for the season throbbed more than my foot. Pain is easily controlled. How we deal and adapt defines how we deal with the world around us. In an instant, things change, and we move on. Stopping is not an option. The world keeps spinning, and the race continues. We may be slowed down, but with the right attitude we can come back stronger than we started and learn something about ourselves. Once we know that we can continue through anything, we have the confidence to start down paths that feel perilous.