Chicken Soup for the Soul 20th Anniversary Edition (18 page)

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.

~George Bernard Shaw

Sports is human life in microcosm.

~Howard Cosell

M
y childhood sucked. Thank God.

My parents divorced when I was 18 months old. My dad took me because, frankly, my mother didn’t want me. In fact, when the doctor first told my mother she was pregnant with me, her response was anger and disappointment. After I was born she was generally just disinterested in me and simply handed me over to my father. She was a woman who never really wanted to be a mother and thankfully for me she admitted that to herself and gave me up to my dad. He really didn’t know what to do with me either, but was willing to “do what had to be done” (one of his favorite mantras).

My dad was only 23 years old when I was born, and back then, men didn’t raise kids on their own. He had just moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to what must’ve seemed like the middle of nowhere (Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I was born) to be an overworked and grossly underpaid football coach for the university there. He was alone, lonely and wounded from the divorce, with no idea how to raise a son.

So he parented the only way he knew how — like he coached. That meant, no whining, no crying, no excuses, and lots of yelling. My dad was infamous on the gridiron for one of his coaching philosophies: no matter how hard a player was hit on the field and how hurt they got, they were not allowed to come out of the game. One time a linebacker got really smashed in the middle of the field, wobbled to the sideline and begged my dad to be taken out of the game. My dad grabbed him by the facemask and screamed, “Not unless you are showing bone.” The player pulled his shoulder pad back and his collarbone was sticking out of his neck skin like a Thanksgiving turkey. Thus came the line I heard hundreds of times: “No, you cannot stay home from school sick, unless you are ‘showing bone.’”

Get rejected, fail at something, fall down, scrape your knee? The only sympathy I heard was “Hey, No Pain, No Gain.” He actually had that painted in big block letters on our garage where he would relentlessly slam around his Olympic size weight set starting at 5 every morning, without fail. Miss free throws at the basketball game? Do

1,000 free throw practice shots before you come home. Trouble dribbling with your left hand? Tie the right one around your back and dribble for eight hours. Get a ‘C’ in math, it’s workbooks and math school all summer. No relenting. You didn’t get love or attention in my house unless you achieved.

It is because of this “dysfunctional” childhood that I have become the highly functioning achiever I am today.

• Having to get over issues of abandonment caused me to become vigorously self-reliant.

• Growing up with a tough university football coach father developed my drive and self-motivation.

• Not being doted on taught me to be independent and self-reliant.

• Having to achieve for attention taught me to be goal-oriented and results-minded.

People often see their childhood or difficulties of their past as wounds they need to heal from. Instead I discovered that adversities are your advantage. It’s like how you grow a muscle. You put it under intense stress and challenge it repeatedly. What you are actually doing is tearing the muscle fibers and breaking it down. Then it grows back bigger and stronger than before. You now have the muscles (mental, emotional and psychological) to achieve extraordinary things ordinary people cannot.

Somehow, in his own way, my dad was the best parent a future achiever could ever have. He was strong, disciplined and consistent. He parented/coached me to be the same. I’m incredibly grateful for my childhood training camp. In the end, it seems, my childhood was awesome!

~Darren Hardy

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

~Albert Einstein

I
t happened in an instant.

One small instant held everything — my life, her life, my family — in its clenched fists.

Beads broke in a rush of terror across my forehead as I bolted around the deck and down the stairs. My legs were moving but I couldn’t feel them, couldn’t register anything, or feel anything except for the fear closing in. All I wanted to know in that moment was that my daughter Jolie was alive.

It was one of those events that happened in a split-second and yet it held the potential to shift everything in my life. How I would wake up in the morning. How I would fall asleep at night. How I would kiss my two daughters as I tucked them in and watched them turn their heads to sleep.

My family and I were vacationing on a small private island in Fiji this past summer. When I say small, I mean so small that there is no way to get on or off the island unless it is pre-arranged. We were staying with friends in a beautiful house with a wrap-around balcony. The house was so high up that the drop below the balcony was nearly twenty feet.

The island has this amazing energy that I find hard to put into

words. It’s occupied by the indigenous people of Fiji, most of them whom have never left the island. Fiji is their home and they’re very connected to the earth, the community, and each other.

There were seven or eight local Fijians who worked at the house we stayed in as caretakers and helpers. It was easy to connect with them. They were warm and engaging and had an instinct for getting to know the hearts of people. At one point, the women stopped and told us, “Your youngest daughter Jolie, she’s special. There’s something about her. She’s an old soul and she’s really here for a special purpose.”

One night after dinner, our older daughter, Jemma, rushed in from the balcony after dinner screaming, “JOLIE FELL OFF THE DECK! JOLIE FELL OFF THE DECK!” I could see the terror in her eyes.

We rushed toward the screams to find our Jolie on the ground twenty feet below. She wasn’t moving. My thoughts ran wild:
She’s dead. She’s dead. She’s dead. Please God, don’t let her be dead.

In the seconds that followed I could not run fast enough, could not get there soon enough to scoop my daughter into my arms and hold her tight. The fears stacked on one another:
How will we get her off the island? How will we get her to a hospital? What will happen to my
Jolie?

I was trying to hold it together but inside I felt like I was going to pass out. There was blood coming from her head but we couldn’t tell exactly how bad the injuries might be. All I knew was that she started moving and crying. Thankfully, she was alive and with us.

People gathered around her. Others started inspecting her body for injuries. Since there was no doctors or hospital on the island, one nurse that lived there got to us within twenty minutes. Everyone came together for little Jolie and my family in a remarkable way.

Racked and sucked dry from a fear I’d never known before, I still felt a strange sense of peace drop upon me. I suddenly knew things would be okay.

As we carried Jolie inside to the bedroom, the Fijian women asked if they could pray. They gathered around us holding hands.

The nurse started praying in English and then, in a rhythm like a song, the Fijian women started chanting at the top of their lungs in their native tongue. Each chanted her own prayer but the voices all flowed together in a surreal harmony. Tears stained their cheeks. Tears stained my cheeks. The room felt like it was trembling, like a power was sweeping over it and all I could do was cry and be thankful that my daughter was alive.

Hand in hand with relief came this overwhelming angst and worry that was all-consuming. I became obsessed with fear in the days ahead. The feelings were paralyzing. I could not stop analyzing the situation and asking myself:
What went wrong? How could we have prevented the accident?

One afternoon, I called my dear friend and teacher, Guru Singh, and began bawling my eyes out as I retold him the story. He stopped me and said, “Eric, you’re focusing on what didn’t happen. What didn’t happen is an illusion. Stop focusing on that.”

“Start focusing on what
did
happen,” he continued. “What did happen is a miracle. Just meditate on that and constantly put yourself in that space. You witnessed a miracle. You experienced a miracle. Your daughter lived through a miracle. Your daughter is a miracle.”

His words shifted me into a new space of thinking. He was absolutely right. My daughter lived by the grace of a miracle and my only response from that point forward needed to be gratitude and appreciation for the sacred seconds that make up every moment we share together.

My daughter had only gone to get a glass of water and sixty seconds later she was on the ground, holding with her all of my heart and every dream I had for her. She was inches away from death but by such sacred grace she dropped twenty feet and walked away with barely a scratch.

Today my daughter Jolie is like any other three-year-old. She plays, goes to school, giggles with her sister and snuggles into our arms as if nothing ever happened. But it did and I will never forget it.

Not a day goes by that I don’t look at her and am reminded by the miracle of life she represents. I know now, more than ever before, how precious every second of life is. I know with every breath I take how blessed each soul, young and old, is to have these moments.

Just as the Fijians said, I am convinced that my Jolie is here for such a special reason.
We all are.
And in embracing the miracle moments of our lives, we find more meaning, more purpose and appreciation, more conscious cosmic calling, gratitude and joy in all we do.

Life is so very fragile and yet we are here and I’m not taking one second for granted. My Jolie taught me that with her angelic spirit. She is my pure joy.

~Eric Handler