It is said that life is a series of obstacles that give our life meaning, make us examine the path we have taken and ponder what our future holds. As I sat staring at my father’s coffin last week after he had lost his battle with cancer, I found myself thinking about those obstacles and their meaning….and the high jump track and field event.
My thoughts drifted to a story I had read about Emily Mathason. She was a champion high jumper at a Pennsylvania high school until Hodgkin’s lymphoma sapped her strength and kept her from clearing a critical bar height during a championship event. Thinking about Emily's story, I was struck by how the high jump event was a great metaphor for the challenges we face in life. When we are young, the “bar” is set low (though it seems high to us at the time). Getting over those low bar heights is fairly straight forward……run and jump. As the competition continues, the height of the bar continually rises making the jumps increasingly difficult. The athlete must change their approach to the bar height. So the high jumpers change their leap technique, use certain shoes, practice on different surfaces and run make precise run approaches. Like the high jumper, we must somehow learn to clear the “high bar” obstacles in our life through the process of trial, error and experience. And then something like cancer comes along and sets the bar so high that we don’t know how or if we can even clear it. But clearing the bar is not an option. If we don’t, we are out of the event.
Perhaps that is why I was thinking about Emily’s high jump story that day. She was able to use cancer to leap over her obstacles. For her, cancer was the beginning of a path that would bring her closer to friends and family and lead to a future of many new and exciting things. For my father, cancer was a spotlight exposing who and what were really important in his life before it ended. For both, fighting cancer was the reminder of how precious life is.
3 comments:
Well said Robert. One must take life day by day and always take it to the fullest extent possible. We never know what life has to offer but we do know that we must jump that next high jump to continue living in this wonderful world we live in.
My dad beat his cancer but then died of a massive coronary, we never know, do we????????
Thanks Russell. Its kind of odd, the older I get, the more value I place on my time, but it goes by so fast that it doesn't seem I have time to enjoy it.
Nice piece. Very sorry to hear about your dad. Priorities play a big role in the equation as well. We can spend our energy trying to clear the hurdle or we spend our energy always talking about clearing the hurdle. It's funny how my own priorities in life have changed so much, sometimes back and forth, over the years.
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