Road Rash

So my son fell of his bike this morning.

Yes, he was wearing his helmut.

Yes, that is how you spell 'helmut' but it's always gonna look weird.

No, he didn't break any bones.

But he did get quite a nice bit of road rash from the middle of his calf all the way up to his knee.

Don't worry, there was hardly any blood.

Yet for a kid who seems so fearful of the big scary outside world, he sure does crash and burn a lot. So much in fact, that we are almost out of band aids. For his birthday in a few weeks I'm seriously considering getting him a jumbo sized first aid kit.

Just what every boy wants.

An unlimited suppy of gauze and anti-bacterial wipes.

He also had this tiny knick on the end of his big toe.

He insisted that that too needed a bandaid.

Which is why we've run out of bandaids.

It's not the pain of the wound that freaks him out, it's the sight of it.

So after calming him down and covering him head to toe with neosporin, he was back outside and ready to take on the universe.

Resilience.

That's such a good word for such a fascinating concept.

Resilience.

I often stop to think about what 'success' means. Or in corporate speak what success 'looks like.'

What's the Big Picture? What will the view be from Journey's End. And the project can be small, like losing the last inch before you squeeze your butt into those old jeans, it can be big, like, quiting your job to chase a dream, or it can be monsterous, like, maybe living a life worth living.

And there are such highly towted atributes such as strength, fearlessness, courage and preseverance.

But we honestly use those kinds of words when we really mean single-minded, pig-headed, dogmatic, insane, or too stupid to take no for an answer.

But resilience is something different, isn't it?

It's fluid, malleable, you might even say organic. It responds to the blows of life, not in the way heated iron might respond to the blows of a smith's hammer, but in the way a lake might respond to a skipping stone.

The lake doesn't ignore the stone. It doesn't spend any time seeking ways to protect itself from future stones. It ripples and then lets the stone sink in for a bit and pretty much goes "Okay . . . well that happened."

Imagine all the things that happen within a day, a week, a lifetime, all the damage, from contusions of the skin to compound fractures of the heart. It's not courage or strength that calms the waters, it's resilience.

Resilience can be like a big fat tube of Neosporin. Apply liberally to the affected area. Repeat until you're all healed up.

But it can't be applied to everything. Obviously a zen approach to life isn't going to magically wash the dishes or write this blog, and . . . if I hadn't been too pig-headed to take 'no' for an answer, I may never have been able to convince my wife that I was the love of her life.

You gotta pound the pavement sometimes.

I don't suggest you do that literally by falling off your bicycle.

But pound the pavement none-the-less.

And pound it with the understand that the metaphorical road rash is gonna be a thing.

And after the pain and the blood and the tears and the anit-bacterial wipes are all gone, just think about running out to your friends and slowly peeling the bandaid back; "Dudes . . . check this out."