For me to say don’t give up it’s something more friendly, when there’s nothing more to say. So maybe it doesn’t have the same impact that this phrase does to the majority of people. Having this in perspective, I think that people usually say this phrase when they want to cheer you up. This could be in the middle of a personal conversation or even it’s the battlefield. Which reminds me of how Valvano talks about his days as a coach. Some techniques that he used were from a book that he read. He said this book made him grow as a person. Which is good because that’s what a good book does.
He mentions that in the middle of a battlefield or even in your own life you need to focus on only 3 things: family, religion and the field. Now you are going to think how the last one is very obsolete, when actually it’s quite the contrary. The field can be seen as a metaphor for your home, those feelings, persons and things that are called home, that’s our personal field. And that precisely is what we should focus on.
Sometimes we are very distracted by other things that of course affect our lives but they aren’t really important in our emotional life. Where today doing some presentations came to me in a more realistic way, how we all suffer from a vaguely good mentally state because of those distractions. Sometimes we are so focused on how successful I’m going to be that we ignore the fact that we should be loving. We should have a crazy experience.
Because as Valvano said, time is never going back. And to him it became more real when he was diagnosed with cancer. Which is very interesting because of the way he starts saying nothing has changed, everything it’s the same. Even though he knows that he’s running out of time. But this also came with a little wisdom. It teaches him about the importance of: laugh, think and feel. Because cancer took him many abilities but never couldn’t take those three, no if he didn’t let him. Which ironically he finishes his speech saying that… saying “Cancer can take away all my physical abilities. It cannot touch my mind, it cannot touch my heart, and it cannot touch my soul. And those three things are going to carry on forever.”
It’s true that ESPN gave him some good too, just like a wonderful team of young adults and how to value everyone no matter what. And that also made him the person who he was. At the middle of the speech it was very repetitive for me to hear about the book and his ESPN experience. I even thought of skipping that part, but I didn’t. I don’t really know what makes me stay reading it all even though those parts are going to give me blurry memories in the future. But one thing that this experience / speech taught me was to value my time more. Do not care so much about the things because in just one second everything can change. One day you can be a successful coach of young adults and on the other you can barely stay standing.
So that makes us, the reader, feel this need to start value our life. To start laughing more often and to think just the important things and then to feel every detail. And honestly I don’t know if I’m going to attain those things, but one thing I’m sure of is that I’m going to try my best.
I’m going to assume that “crazy” is a good thing.
JAJJAA it is