This landing, the whatever number that have occurred before it, knowing that someone knows what moondust feels like, knows what the vacuum of space smells like, knowing at some point in my genetic past life or death was one failed hunt away. With all this and what comes in between, the human spirit is on my mind.
I am thinking of success versus failure. I am thinking when at the end of the day do you go home with head hung low and when should you marvel at getting in line for the roller coaster in the first place.
The olympics being the only thing I have watched over the last week adds to this.
The Bulgarian's father screams, “ Look! Look at that beautiful boy, my son, my beautiful boy,” and I fight tears.
I don’t know what the Bulgarians man's son was doing or did or was going to do. I was drawn only by the sound of that man’s voice. The voice of love and pride. I don't even know what either of them look like. I fought the tears. I should have let them fall.
Later that day NBC settles its cameras on a close up of one of the female gymnast feet covered in healing blisters and with a quick glimpse of the taped up big toe, broke, supposedly needing to be iced just to put weight on it and then that foot propels this athlete towards a vault that will take her dozens of feet into the air to land with the force of her body weight and gravity on those very feet that made me cringe moments before.
The article in the Huffington post starts out “Oscar Pistorius fails...” to qualify. He did come in last in his heat.
I watched this heat. He ran faster then I have ever run in my life.
I watched this man wearing prosthetic devices for legs run his heart out that day he advanced to this round.
In this round he finished last.
I never once saw failure.
I saw the heat’s winner come to him at the end of the race. That “Winner” asked that “loser” if he could wear his name when he raced again. Oscar took his name off and exchanged it with that other olympian and fought tears.
I did not fight tears.
And Oscar didn't fail! That headline did. The wonderful professional opinionated author of that piece, who also probably could never run as fast as Oscar did, probably could have picked a better verb when he chose “failed.”
At some point in his life Oscar said, “Just because you have a disability doesn't mean you have a disadvantage.” He asked for no favors, only a chance to grab what he could from the apple tree of life before it was too late.
NASA shot a 3 ton bullet 33 million miles and hit a seven foot bulls eye.
Yay us humans!
That was one hell of a spear throw.
No comments:
Post a Comment