What are you willing to struggle for?

I remember when I was a kid, playing basketball was my life. It was my dream of being a point guard in the NBA, I could imagine myself every night breaking ankles and dunking on opponents left right and centre. The same was being a guitarist for a band, I would go to bed listening to all kinds of bands that I was obsessed with and imagining myself on stage at the top of the world just killing it every night. Unfortunately neither happened. Well not unfortunate at all. I didn’t actually love either of those options. I didn’t love the idea of playing small gigs for years on end with the risk of never making it big. I didn’t love the homework my basketball coach gave me to practice at home. I remember only having the ring at a lower height so I could dunk it every day and imagine I was dunking on 7 foot opponents. Anyway the point is that I never loved the path for either option.

Bethany Hamilton has been a Professional Surfer her whole life, she imagined being a surfer forever and she knew it was her passion from the moment she landed her first wave. On a regular day with her family, she was surfing when a shark attacked her. She was lucky enough to survive, but the shark took one of her arms clean. That one moment had taken everything from her, her dreams died on the spot, no warning just gone like that.

Bethany went into what came to be the most traumatic stage of her entire life. Her identity was being challenged, and what she had done her entire life had just been erased in her mind. In her words “life came to a halt” and “thought about taking up photography” now that professional surfing didn’t seem like an option in her mind anymore.

Although something interesting happened with Bethany. she went onto accomplishing something that not many people in this world have the ability to even conceptualise. Bethany took back surfing again. She was never going to be as good as she was before, but she discovered that her metric of happiness didn’t revolve around being the best surfer. Her metric was simple and it was long term, it was the thrill of riding waves.

For Bethany, Surfing was her passion and it was everything for her. She started working at ways to be a one armed surfer. It started with trying to get a prosthetic arm and that didn’t work for her, she then decided she was just going to simply try one armed. She decided that if she can still surf, she will and nothing was going to stop that. She was willing to go through the hell of learning to surf with one arm. The possible embarrassment of failing and looking like an idiot to her friends didn’t affect her.

Throughout the trauma she suffered from the horrific attack, she gained something even more beautiful than her passion. She was gifted the opportunity to role model for kids who had been through similar experiences as her and now her metric had attained to a whole new level. She would go on to recieve thousands of letters from people who discovered her and were impacted by her story. There was no short term pleassures or suffering that would change her metric of happiness.

This is a prime example on what we as humans need to ask ourselves. What obstacles are we willing to go through? What are we going to reject in life? What challenges are we choosing?

It’s not about thinking about the results we want but what process we want.