I was assisting a client with a crisis, this evening, and a story from my childhood again came to mind. It has come to be relevant on several occasions over the past month or so, and while I realize that this story is old to some people, I still see the value in sharing it, and the hard lesson I learned one summer...
When I was fourteen years
old or so, I had an old Honda CT90 trail bike that looked a lot like
a mustard colored moped on steroids. That little bike got me all over
the nearly seven hundred acres of my grandparents farm every summer.
Of course I rode with no helmet, often pushing the little 89cc 4
stroke to speeds that would have made my parents quite uncomfortable.
It was that summer of I
guess it must have been 1985 or 86, that I was on my way from the
dairy barn at one end of the acreage to “the house” at the other.
It was a typical hot and humid Michigan summer, well into the 80s
with air so thick you could cut it, so I was likely going even a
little faster than usual to enjoy the breeze. I had just cleared the
sand pit that we used to fill the free stalls in the cattle barn, and
started into the massive hayfield on the south side of the lot my
grandparent’s home was on, when it happened.
If anyone reading this
has seen the movie “Spider Man” with Tobey Maguire, the scene
where he first discovered his “Spider Sense,” you know where
everything slowed to nearly a standstill? That is what happened
precisely. I suddenly found myself airborne, floating what felt like
a mile above my bike, which was proceeding in a straight line without
me. I could almost count the spokes on the slowly turning wheels, and
the wind that had been whistling in my ears mere seconds ago had been
replaced by complete and utter silence. I closed my eyes. I knew this
was going to hurt.
When I opened my eyes
again, I could see my bike lying on its side, with the front wheel
still spinning against the air. Nothing felt like it was broken, and
I was pissed to say the least. I stood and kicked the rear tire,
where I noticed the drive chain lay broken, and cried out as an
excruciating pain shot through my ankle and up my leg. I looked down
at my right ankle and saw that my foot looked more like a football
already, and the swelling had just begun. Yep, definitely broken.
I sat there for a moment
and rocked back and forth in pain. I felt the sweat running down the
back of my neck, and realized that not only did I hurt, but I was
really thirsty. Then I looked down the long row of fence posts that
lined that hay field and swallowed hard—or would have if my throat
hadn’t been so dry. It was almost a mile in the sun to my
grandparent’s house, and help. I looked back over my shoulder in
the direction that I had come, and realized it was just as far—if
not farther—to the dairy barn and a phone.
So there I was, back in
the old days before the advent of the cell phone, in the middle of
over six hundred acres of woods and fields, sitting in the hot sun
with a broken leg, a motorcycle that was going nowhere, and no one
knowing which way I had gone. I was faced with three choices;
One, go back the way I
came, through the sand pit and up the two-track to the dairy barn and
call for help. Two, go straight ahead down the fence row in the heat
until I reached the farmhouse and call for help. Or three, sit there
in the sun and wait for someone to find me.
I tested my leg, found
that there was no way it was going to bear my weight, and took my
first step down the fence row anyway. The next hour and a half or so
was excruciating. I walked, hopped, and at times crawled the distance
of the field that my cousins sometimes used as a landing strip for
their crop-duster. My leg was throbbing, the heat was unbearable. My
mouth felt like it was full of cotton balls. I made my way to the
kitchen and called my mother, who came and took me to the emergency
room in Mount Pleasant.
At fourteen, I learned a
valuable lesson in life.
You do what you have to
do.
Sometimes there will be
no one to rescue you. Sometimes there will be no outside support. No
cavalry to save the day. No one with a big “S” on their chest.
Nobody to do it for you when it gets tough. The only person you can
rely on at the end of the day, is you.
In our every day work
relationships, when we don’t feel valued or respected, it hurts.
Sometimes the disrespect is intentional, mean or even cruel. When
that happens, we have three choices;
We can complain to those
who will listen, hoping that by venting and revisiting the past we
will somehow feel better, stronger or validated. We can sit and wait,
hoping that things will get better and feeling miserable in the
meantime, or we can move on with our day and take care of our
business.
Bills still have to be
paid. Clients still need the services they have paid us for. Products
still need service. Deadlines still have to be met, and none of these
situations gives a thimble full of that product that our dairy cows
produced about how you feel… And no, I am not talking about milk.
At fourteen I developed
my disdain for weakness and the inability to make a decision. I
realized that if you don’t choose, life will choose for you, and
more often than not the failure to make a choice is not going to be
in your favor. This realization was tested and proven twenty years
later with the passing of Marissa, my oldest daughter. No matter how
much it hurt, and how my world had just simply stopped, things had
continued on as normal for nearly everyone else. The electric bill
still came in the mail, groceries still had to be purchased and my
other children still needed their father.
I had to choose to walk
that fence row again, this time with a broken heart.
It is absolutely acceptable to hurt. It is unavoidable really. It is okay to want to vent. It is fine to process emotions. We are all human, and we all have them. It is the time and the place and the intent in and which you choose to hurt, vent or process that makes the difference. What you choose to do
during times of stress, crisis, or pain is what defines who you are.
It’s what separates us
from the civilized folks.
After all, we are still
savages.
Oh, and just to finish
the story of the broken leg. When I finally reached the house from my
useless trail bike, I found the place empty. My grandfather’s truck
was gone, and I did not see the tail end of my grandmother’s Ford
Taurus poking out of the garage. I was completely and utterly alone.
I gulped down several glasses of iced tea I picked up the phone to
call for help.
Remember that this was in
the mid 1980s in rural Michigan? Remember how I said that this was
back before cell-phones? Well, some of you may remember something
called that “party line” and I don’t mean that late night 900
commercial. For those of you who don’t know, or don’t remember,
the party line was where two or more homes share a phone line.
I put my finger into the
little hole on the phone dial where the number “9” showed, and I
heard a woman’s voice in the receiver. It was the little old lady
in the house at the top of the hill, carrying on a conversation with
one of her friends or children, or perhaps grandchildren, who knows?
I don’t know how long I was on the line before she must have
realized I was there, but she said;
“Hello?”
“Hi,” I responded,
“I’m sorry to interrupt, but I think I broke my leg, and I need
to call for a ride.”
“In a second, dear,”
she told me. “We’re almost finished here.”
CTM
