Tough Going – The Tough Never Stop Going
“Shadow puppets are
not real puppets. They are the shadows
of real puppets.”
Everyone gets knocked down from time to time. And we always
hear the tired old saw, “It’s not how many times you get knocked down, it’s how
many times you get back up.” Well, of
course that’s basically bullshit.
Because pretty much anyone, or everybody, is going to get back up – eventually.
They (you) have to get back up … I mean you can’t like stay down. At some point you are going to get back
up. Even if it’s to just run away. Even to run away, you have to get up; unless
you’re really good at running on your hands and knees.
I supposed that’s been done, but I don’t see it working very
well.
Now, I am not pretending to be some kind of example of a hero, or a person who has all this wa-hoo-wa-hoo courage and gets back up
like a gladiator or anything. Yeah, I
have been knocked down a lot – and I mean I have been really really really knocked on my keester
(kister …SP). Face down in the shit, as
it were. Stepped on, stomped on, pounded
to jelly quite a number of times. Not to
be confused with my being cowardly, or soft, or lacking in spine. Not that that really matters.
Then comes, “When the going
gets tough, the tough get going.” Hmmm … not so much bullshit, but kind of
missing the obvious. What I have noticed
is that those who are tough,
generally have always been tough. The
tough are accustomed to going, being
tough, or at least have learned to recognize tough going. (This is tricky
to verbalize in text.)
Some people are just simply lucky, maybe. Some, maybe a lot of people, have not had
many tough situations, so when their
particular goings take on high degree
of difficulty (toughness .. ?), all of a sudden they either have to accept it
and knuckle down, or give up … I assume.
And, if they do knuckle down,
as it were, all of a sudden they are heroes
for this? That’s the bullshit part. People who are actually tough, never stop going.
In fact, people who are actually truly tough, I conjecture
(rarely) much notice how the going is
going. They just get up, if they’ve been knocked down, and keep going. As a veteran Boys JV Soccer Coach, I could
always tell which athletes had a good chance to move up to Varsity. When they made a mistake, or got knocked down
(for real), the ones who were truly tough,
always hopped right up and got right back in the game. The posers, or players who weren’t actually very tough, would put on
some kind of childish show – stomp their feet, yell at the ref, make sure
everybody saw that they had been roughed up or whatever. We called ‘em showboaters, you know like actors.
Shakespeare said, “Life is a stage and we are but players …”
or something close to that. I have read
a lot of The Bard, as was required in
my education, and while I totally give huge
snaps for his contributions to literature and culture and all that, it
doesn’t mean his stuff is gospel! I’m sorry, Bill, but truly true life
ain’t no stage. For most of us, life is
tough. Life ain’t no make believe. There are no rest periods between acts.
When we flub a line in the script, or miss a mark on the stage, or screw
up some part of our assigned bit, there is no rewind or do-over. No mulligans
in real life (a mulligan, if you don’t
know, is a kind of freebie, off the
books, redo stroke in golf – like if you really top the ball). None of that in real life! Screw up and it’s forever on your scorecard!
And, of course, being bipolar, I know that for a fact! Since I’ve screwed up a lot. This does reinforce my conjecture here,
though. For some people, maybe a lot of
people (also), life is just simply tough
ALL the time. When you get knocked down,
it’s like, “Well, this is familiar.” Getting up after being knocked down becomes more second nature,
than any kind of act of heroism. When
things get tough, you just push
harder. It’s what you’ve had to do in
your entire personal living memory, so it’s not a big deal. The thing is,
nobody really notices it. They only seem
to notice the showboaters; the ones
like the kids on my soccer teams, who acted all hurt and put upon.
So maybe, if “Life is a stage”, then it ought to be realized
that most of the real work is done by
the stagecrew and not the actors (or players). And, when the going gets tough, don’t expect
anyone to keep going unless they are
already tough.
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dalepeterson.us
Just published “Twelve
Roses for Kathy – A journey on a motorcycle out of the darkness of bipolar
disorder”
So here is Merck sleeping – and, as I said, he’s not
dead. It’s just how he looks when he’s
sleeping.
Definitely weird, right?
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