Last night, Danny and I watched a movie called Gifted Hands which is the true story of Ben Carson, the acclaimed Pediatric Neurosurgeon who was the first to successfully separate twins conjoined at the head in 1987 and who is expected to announce sometime soon that he will joining the 2016 race for President.
The past year or so, I've heard bits and pieces about Carson and the possibility that he might run for President but in truth, I knew little to nothing about his background, his education, his family or his career to date. In fact, I assumed quite a bit about his upbringing that after watching the film, I realize was neither true nor fair and spoke more to my bias than to the reality of Ben Carson's life.
The youngest son of a single mother, Ben Carson grew up in Detroit in the 1950s. He was learning challenged, poor, black and had what he himself has described as a 'violent temper'. His mother often worked two or three jobs to support the family and at one point, realizing that Ben's behavior was leading him down a very tough road, came up with the idea to task her boys with reading two books each week and writing book reports that they would turn in to her for review. Later in life, Ben would learn that his mother had very limited education herself and often could not even read the reports he'd written.
Regardless, her idea worked and Ben pulled himself up from being the self proclaimed dummy of his class to a man in love with learning. He attended Yale and ultimately graduated from the University of Michigan School of Medicine before joining John's Hopkins where he now holds the title of Professor Emeritus. Along the way, he faced challenges that many of us today would be hard pressed to find believable and yet they are true.
To be sure, I realize and am so thankful that our country was built upon the backs of the multitudes of people who were not afraid to roll up their shirtsleeves and work hard, people whose names we will never know. People who refused to take no for an answer, people who overcame obstacles so high and so big that to the rest of us, they would have seemed entirely impossible to scale. I guess I just didn't equate the public personality we see in the media with a person that would have had those kinds of obstacles, and there were moments in the movie where I was both shocked at their magnitude and appalled at the fact that in our country, he would have had to overcome them at all.
I sometimes wonder about my littles, I worry if the life their father and I have provided is such that they will never know how it feels to work hard toward a seemingly unattainable goal. We've been blessed and in turn, we have blessed them, and in doing so, have we done them a disservice? I'd like to hope not. I'd like to believe that each of them will at some point in their lives have a passion that ignites the fire in their bellies and forces them to climb any obstacle in their path, to endure any hardship, to be what they are destined to be.
But it seems that life can be easy these days and so we learn to accept the status quo when perhaps what we really should be striving for is excellence at any cost.
Ben Carson's story got me thinking about that song by Eminem, Lose Yourself.
If you had one shot,
Or one opportunity
To seize everything you ever wanted
In one moment
Would you capture it
Or just let it slip?
Would I? Have I? Would you? If everything I'd ever wanted required just a little more work, just a little more passion, just a healthy dose of fear of failure, would I capture it or just let it slip?
I don't know the answer to that question some days. Some days I am definitely all fired up and I know what I want and I am going for it and well, some days, I'm just happy to be sitting in my pjs, working from home in my little cave, practicing yoga and facetiming my littles over the internet.
Maybe its just that at forty six, I still haven't figured out what I want to be when I grow up, and I guess that's going to have to be ok right now. God willing, I have many, many years ahead and maybe a few thousand blog posts to figure that one out. But in the meantime, I'm going to be thankful for people like Ben Carson, people who have paved the way and provided us with living, breathing examples of all we need to unlock the greatness that lies within each of us - hard work, faith, determination and a healthy dose of imagination.
xxo!
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