Obstacles Are the Path
I was a pretty decent high hurdler on my high school track team back in the day. At least in our conference, which was Class C Level, comprised of smaller high schools. I was good enough to qualify for the state meet held at Bowdoin College in my senior year and I got to participate with runners from all over the state. I didn’t do anything to distinguish myself, didn’t win, place or show, but it was an honor to participate and I was proud to make it to that level.
Not long before graduation that same spring, I got a call from the track coach at the college where I was heading in the fall. He said he hoped I was considering joining the track team out there in the Midwest and I said yes I was, thanks. So I started in pursuit of my college track career that fall and the first meet in which I ever participated was at the University of Chicago in their big field house.
Not to put too fine a point on it, I knocked over every single hurdle, I’m not kidding. Dead last, knees banged up, ego intact but bruised. Turns out that the height of college hurdles is three inches higher than high school and that was a bigger gap than this particular college athlete was willing to work on overcoming. So I hung up my spikes and retired, grateful for all I had learned in my years of running track and at least being in the arena. I had some glory days, as Bruce Springsteen put it, and I remember them fondly.
I had reason to recall all of this, just this week, because of a new hire at our store, whom I was training. He just graduated from a large local high school and was himself was a high hurdler. You learn stuff like that while you’re working side-by-side in grocery aisles talking about whatever comes to mind. He’s built like a hurdler, a little taller than I am, and had some considerable success in his high school career. I told him I’d never met anyone since high school whom I was aware had also been a hurdler.
He told me that a new student, a freshman from the Dominican Republic, had come on the team this past year and was really fast, displacing my fellow team member as the new star on the team. “He dusted me,” he said, “he came from nowhere and he’s the number one guy now.” It’s been good talking about what made us each decide to go into the event and what our experiences were like and how we worked on form and technique and what it was like to be pretty good at something for a while.
It occurred to me that what I felt inside of all this was grateful. Grateful for the memories, grateful to have this in common with another team member, grateful for my life in all its varied particulars. This is where it all lives. It’s about shining the light of our Inquiry into a Gratitude-Inspired Life into every dark corner and at least looking. “For what can I be grateful here?”
This old Buddhist saying came to mind. “Obstacles do not block the path They are the path.” Obstacles are the way, quite literally, of this particular path. I had never thought of this application to real life. If you take away the hurdles it is a different race. You can work on technique always, tweaking posture, to help negotiate the path, but the hurdles remain.
As I found out at the state meet at and later at the University of Chicago sometimes these obstacles slow you down, even damage you, and other people may deal with them a little better than you on that particular day. Yet you’re the one in the arena as Roosevelt pointed out, at least going for it, someone who “at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
