Jackson When Life Happens

How to Go from Trap to Triumph
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4835-9190-2
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 116 Seiten

Life. We all want to know how to make the best of it. We all want to know how to get the most out of it. We all want to have the best possible outcome with the least amount of opposition. The tools within these pages will help real people with real issues matriculate through real life, successfully. The riveting and thought provoking, material will help anyone, no matter what stage of life they are in, become better at handling LIFE when it happens.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jackson, William

Leseproben

Have you ever gotten up in the middle of the night to go to the restroom and on the way to the restroom you stubbed that ever so loved pinky toe? Hurt didn’t it? Why did hitting something so small hurt so bad? Well the answer is simple, because you weren’t expecting it. You couldn’t see it coming and you were unable to avoid it.

This is often times how we experience pain…in the dark. Pain experienced in the dark is always the worst because there is no preparation for it. When you’re in the dark, you have no way of controlling what you hit and what you miss. How can you avoid something you don’t even know is coming? Well that answer is simple as well. You can’t.

The true fact of the matter is that you can not avoid pain no matter what you do. It doesn’t care who you are, where you are, where you come from, or where you’re going. It is indiscriminately nonspecific. The reason pain has such a lasting effect is because we are not able to prepare for it. You can try to cross all of you T’s and dot all of your I’s to the best of your ability, but something, one day will hit you and leave you asking “What the heck was that?”. It is the unknown that has the power to turn our lives upside down. The tornado that you have no defense for has the ability to destroy everything you’ve built in a matter of seconds. That unknown pain usually happens very suddenly and its effects linger for a while.

Trust me, I know exactly how it feels to be living your life and suddenly everything changes. In the year 2000, I was a healthy young man. I was active, I was energetic, and I had a lot of great things going on. Good energy seemed to be flowing and I was progressing through life without any major hiccups. Then something happened. I began having the most excruciating headaches I had ever experienced. These were no ordinary migraines. These were something completely different. This was a pain that I had not known before. It wasn’t just a sensitivity to light or sound that magnified my pain. Every single time I took a breath I felt like my head was about to explode.

I had no idea what was going on, other than I needed to slow my breathing to lessen my pain. After being taken to the hospital, things got worse rather quickly. While waiting in the emergency waiting room, I needed to use the restroom. I stood up to go to the bathroom and the entire left side of my body gave out. I mean it gave out completely. I lost all mobility on the entire left side of my body. I didn’t know it at the moment, but I was having a stroke. Not only did I have a stroke, I was paralyzed. I was placed in the intensive care unit where doctors debated over my condition. My case was so severe and uncommon that the hospital had to fly a specialist in (who happen to be out golfing on the complete opposite side of the country). He rushed in immediately and gave me a breakdown of what was happening to me. He explained that I started out having a sinus infection and that it spread to my brain. Once it was there it began gathering fluid on the right side. I ended up needing two (Yes, two!) brain surgeries.

This was a truly life changing event for me. I had seizures that would shake the entire hospital bed. I could not eat, so I was fed through a tube that was forced up my nose and down my throat into my stomach. (Pardon me as I digress for a moment. Did you know they don’t put you to sleep to insert this tube into your stomach through your nose?) Imagine my surprise when the nurse handed me a cup of water and told me to keep swallowing as this tube was being forced up my nose. I wasn’t a happy camper.

There are so many details that I could express about my stay in the hospital but what I really want to share is that after I gained my mobility back (after the doctors thought I would die or at best be a vegetable for the rest of my life) I literally had to learn how to do everything over again. That is when the real frustration began. I can remember one of the first days of physical therapy and the therapist told me “we were going to start off with buttoning a shirt.” I was more than beside myself. I knew how to button a shirt. That was too easy for me. I didn’t want to practice that,I wanted to walk.

The therapist insisted and I refused. We argued until the therapist put a shirt on me and told me “If you can button it, we will work on whatever you want to work on.” Mentally I knew this would be a cake walk. I put my hands up to button the shirt, but I could not do it! My body was no longer a slave to my mind. My hands were not cooperating and it was at that moment that I broke down and cried. I had cried many times throughout my stay in the hospital, but this time was different. This time I cried because I felt like all of this snuck up on me out of nowhere. I had no previous health issues. I was fine. Then, in an instant, I went from healthy and active to not being able to button my own shirt! I was so very hurt.

The devastation of a sneak attack hurts deeper than an attack you can see coming. You would be much more upset with getting sucker punched than you would be by simply losing a fair fight, because even if you lost, you were at least able to fight back. You can feel at peace when you gave the fight your best shot. I’ve learned that the only way to cope with the sudden out of the blue occurrences is to stay your course. You have to take your blows in stride and continue to progress forward.

I could have accepted the doctor’s prognosis and adopted the reality that was provided for me. I could have said to myself “This is how my life will be from now on.” The truth is, I almost did. To be honest, you can face some things in life that are so devastating and so out of the blue that it can cause you to question everything you believed in. The place where you find yourself questioning everything that you knew to be true and reevaluating everything you held dear, is one of the darkest places you could ever be in. The only reason I was able to persevere through such a crazy unexpected experience is because I was determined to live a fulfilled life. I wanted it by any means necessary.

In football there is something called YAC (Yards After Contact). This statistic measures how a player deals with being hit and if they have the ability to push forward after being hit. This ability can be very valuable because it shows the coach that the player isn’t scared of contact, thus proving that the player can be trusted with the ball in their hands. It is the same with life. When you are able to endure a hit and keep pressing, you prove that you aren’t scared of trials. You prove that you can be trusted with your life’s purpose because you are willing to endure the pain in order to ensure that the purpose (or the play) is fulfilled at all costs. The determination to succeed then overrides the concentration on the hits you take along the way. Subconsciously, you can give your mind another alternative rather than allowing it to dwell on the negative effect of being hit.

The mind is a very complex instrument. You would be surprised at how you process pain when you don’t place sole focus on the situation for a long period of time. Let’s look at our earlier scenario. You get up in the middle of the night and head towards the bathroom. Without warning, your toe and the edge of the bed collide, igniting unexpected pain that prompts a sudden outburst (that hopefully is rated G and not R) but the fact still remains that you still have to go to bathroom. Now you can handle this unfortunate event one of two ways. You can stop, sit, and relish on the pain of your toe while blaming the bed you bought and strategically placed in your room, or you can decide to simply keep moving.

When you decide to stay the course and keep moving, even if you have to limp, you tell your brain “Yes it hurts, but my destination is far more important than the current situation.” I mean really, can you imagine having a hurt toe and using the bathroom on yourself just a few feet away from the toilet? I think that would go down as one of the worst nights of your life. When you encounter pain, in that very instant, you have to make a conscious choice to dwell there or to move on.

As a child, I had various falls, bumps, and bruises. The same that most young boys would normally experience on his quests for adventure. One common thing I can remember hearing when I would get hurt is to either “Shake it off” or “Walk it off”. I couldn’t understand why someone wasn’t running to my rescue. As I grew older, I realized that there was actually a method to this madness and it wasn’t some insensitive ploy to prevent having to tend to my wounds. It made sense. When I put myself in motion, I then compartmentalized my pain and became more focused on my action. Surprisingly enough, after a few seconds of “Shaking” or “Pacing” I was more eager to get back to my adventure and forgot all about my pain. This is how we should deal with being blindsided by circumstance.

It is a given that as long as you are a human being, one thing is certain, you will experience life. The thing about life is that it is not always fair, predictable, or to your liking. It is that way because pain is a necessary part of life. As a matter of fact it is imperative for growth, hence the term growing pains. Growth stretches you from where you are familiar, and it hurts.

It hurts losing that relationship you had become so accustomed to having. It hurts to be laid off from a job...