VICTORY WITHOUT CHALLENGE IS TRIUMPH WITHOUT GLORY

(These thoughts are added to three times a week and cover a INFINITE variety of subjects and insights)

I’m three months from EIGHTY now and so I will try to heed my own advice.

I must continue to harbor the kind of positive thinking that allows me to think that even if I got lost in the middle of a desert and could not find the ocean I would still fall to my knees in despair and shout to the heavens, “WOW WHAT A BEACH!” Think about it! Would not some part of your life be improved by applying this kind of attitude.? Would things be better if the only water you came up with was a bucket of tears?

Perhaps this story will underline it a bit.

In 1981, a story appeared in the Tampa Tribune about a woman by the name of Peggy Paul. She had TERMINAL CANCER and had been told she would soon be dead. And then a nurse said to her, “You don’t really have to die, just because the doctors say you will. Sometimes people don’t.”

So Peggy Paul began to image her immune system working overtime. She pictured her white blood cells as LITTLE RABBITS running up and down and through her system eating up the malignant cancer cells. She said she chose to picture rabbits because they multiply fast and she figured the more she had the better. In not that long awhile the liver cancer got smaller and smaller and smaller and one day it was gone.

Gerontologist John Roe once observed that a seventy-five year old diabetic “might be sick enough to need a nursing home or well enough to sit on the Supreme Court.”

A young man sat in a dentist office reading an astrology book. When he reached page five he read the following, “If you had been born two days earlier, you would have been WEALTHY, WITTY AND WISE.”

But it doesn’t work that way. For to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “Our troubles and our triumphs, our good days and our bad days, are not in our stars but in ourselves.”

In the summer of 1982, I CRASHED A HANG GLIDER and broke my left arm in forty some places. In the X-rays it looked more like confetti than an arm. For two months it was paralyzed and the doctor would give me no great hope of hitting the ski slopes that winter. But I did not say to myself, “Neil, now you’ve gone and done it and there’s nothing you can do about it. Your arm is paralyzed and it will be like that for the rest of your life.” No, instead I began to quote John Dryden to myself, “I may be wounded but I am not slain. I’ll lie me down and rest awh8ile…then rise to fight again.”
For two months nothing happened, it just hung limp and useless. But for those two months over and over again I pictured my arm moving. Pictured my nerves responding. For two months I would not give up on the idea of a MIRACLE.

And then one magic day I moved my little finger. I wasn’t ready to play the piano again. I couldn’t hold anything without dropping it. But finally all the messages I had been sending my arm were being answered. Lifted off the answer pad of my nerve center and acted on it.

By January of 1983 I was back on the ski slopes in Vermont pushing off with both arms. By February I could lift a small carry-on suitcase and place it in the airplane overhead luggage rack with my formerly paralyzed arm. Today I type at my usual fast pace. I play the piano in equal manner. But what counts I that when I had only hope I made the BEST OF THE WORST and would have continued to do so…come what may.

In my shirt pocked was a piece of paper that I had lifted out more times than I can remember upon which I had written, “VICTORY WITHOUT CHALLENGE IS TRIUMPH WITHOUT GLORY,”