Life happens.
This is not a dress rehearsal; this is life in session.
It’s the real thing and here we are, doing the best we can with what we have. We may be good at it sometimes; we may stink at it sometimes. It really doesn’t matter that much in terms of what happens to us.
What matters is, how do we move forward when life decides to happen to us in a way that doesn’t fit very well with the life we’d planned or envisioned.
“Oh sh*t,” I said, as I found myself on the ground before I had even an inkling that I’d slipped.
“What the hell just happened?”
My wife and one of my sons were in the house getting ready to head to the NFL game we had planned to go to for months.
I struggled to my feet, limping very badly, whilst I looked at the area on which I’d fallen.
It didn’t really seem that cold out but ice had accumulated on the bricks that were our walkway from the house to the driveway. The bricks seemed to get the ice first but when I went out that evening, already being dark out, I completely missed it.
I could feel the swelling start to gather quickly inside my knee as I hobbled back toward the house.
Right about then, my wife came out the door and took one look at me limping toward the door.
“Oh no, what happened?”
“Slipped on the ice. I didn’t see it. Be really careful.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t go,” she said.
“No, we’re definitely going,” I said in my typically defiant, “nothing’s going to stop me” tone.
I was in my mid 20’s when I tore my ACL for the first time, playing Wallyball. I’d gone through four years of playing basketball in college and, other than a little meniscus damage, was doing okay as far as my knee health. That knee health thing was about to come to an end.
I didn’t go to the doctor back then. I just iced, “ibuprofened,” ace bandaged, and waited for it to feel better. Eventually it did feel better but at that time I didn’t know I’d torn my ACL , I also didn’t know that my knee was going to suffer much more by not getting that ACL fixed.
About two years prior to slipping on that ice, I’d had my ACL that was missing from so many years before, replaced.
The doc at that time told me I had the knee of an 80-year-old, due to the damage caused by not having an ACL for so many years. Apparently, we need those pesky ACLs to keep our knees from being unstable. The instability causes the knee to go places it would not go had it been stabilized. Especially when playing basketball at least five days per week.
Sometimes, what you thought you’d addressed and fixed, comes undone.
Sometimes, life takes you down the last road you were planning on going down.
Sometimes, something that seems so easy (going to a football game), becomes incredibly difficult.
Sometimes, you’re going to slip on the ice.
The question then becomes, “what am I going to do with this change in direction?”
Am I going to start to feel sorry for myself and wonder why life is so difficult and seemingly unfair?
Am I going to assign the blame so that I can relieve myself of the pressure of taking responsibility for my actions and reactions?
Am I going to get angry and stay angry because of my “bad luck?”
Those are all options, aren’t they? They are all ways that we can choose to “deal” with the difficult situations that life will inevitably throw our way. Here’s another option:
Get pissed, get angry, get hurt . . . then get over it.
It’s okay to feel the emotions that go along with tough circumstances or difficulties that we’ll certainly encounter, however . . .
We need to feel those things, and then move on.
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