Pivot Point


          I believe that there is no one doing so well or so poorly but that their life can be changed unalterably for the better.  The best of the best can still improve, and the worst of the worst still has something left to live for.
          It's said that life turns on small hinges.  That's true.  Sometimes they're so small that no one else could ever know about them.
          Some of the most important pivot points of my life weren't things that outside observers would have been able to see, even if you could have been with me every moment of every day.  That's because the meaning I chose to make of the world around me is a key component of who I am inside.
          When I was in 8th grade, my History and English teachers combined forces to institute a debate competition on historical topics.  My group was particularly gung ho about it and with a lot of hard work we made it all the way to the championship.  Then, right before the final round my teacher announced that there was going to be a change of teams.  I don't even remember what the rationale was, but for some reason it was decided that my team was going to get split in half and combined with two other teams.

          We were equal parts devastated and upset.  How could our teacher have the nerve to break up the best foursome since the Beatles just to satisfy his own capricious whims?  It didn't make sense.  And to add insult to injury, instead of cruising to victory together, we were being forced to compete against each other. 
          Well I wasn't going to stand for it.  So I didn't.  I went home, got on the computer, and researched both sides of the debate.  And then I went back to school and gave the information that I researched to my team members that were supposed to debate against us.  Armed with my added support, they won.  And in that moment, so did I.
          Because, you see, I refused to accept the meaning that my teacher tried to impose on us by splitting us up.  My membership in our team transcended any artificial separation mechanism that may have made it appear otherwise.  The moment I made that decision, the whole situation changed without anything having changed at all.

          In life we all have moments when the teacher breaks up the dream team.  The moments when our hopes and reality just don't quite match up.  What we do in that critical space between blaming the world and taking action even when the onus isn't on us determines whether the moment remains yet another ordinary building block of life or transforms into a pivot point that lifts us higher.
Let's act step forward from what is normally done to what we decide to do.

That's the stuff heroes are made of.


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Drew Coffman, "Spin" https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode lisa cee (Lisa Campeau), "swirl" https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode


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