The Watershed

Up on the watershed
Standing at the fork in the road
You can stand there and agonize
Till your agony’s your heaviest load

Never fly as the crow flies
Get used to a country mile
When you’re learning to face
The path at your pace, every choice is worth your while.

– The Indigo Girls, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, used by permission.

Several years ago, I was acquainted with a well-known captain here in the Denver area. While I never had the opportunity to fly with him, several of my friends did. And without exception they all said he was just the kind of captain first officers love to fly with: technically competent, ran a great crew, fun on a layover.

But did you know that airline pilots have to retire at a certain age? Eventually that career-ending limitation caught up with this guy and he was required by law to hang up his hat with the laurel leaves on the bill and his jacket with the four stripes on the sleeve.

At that point he found himself standing on a watershed. On one side of the watershed, leading up to retirement, he had been the quintessential airline pilot. It’s all he’d ever wanted to do; it’s all he’d ever done. His entire identity was wrapped up in this idea of flying big jets around the world.

But now he was being challenged by Fortune to look down the other side of the watershed and try to figure out how to be something… else.

As I tell you this story I think about Victor Frankl and how he taught us that life is not so much a quest for pleasure or power as it is a quest for meaning. And I think of Friedrich Nietsche who tells us that “one who has a ‘why’ to live for can bear almost any ‘how.’”

This Captain needed some meaning to live for. He needed a new ‘why’ to help him bear his new ‘how.’ He was facing a hard battle.

Sadly, he chose not to fight it. The day after his retirement he drove to the fire station in his neighborhood, parked his car, pulled out a gun and created a permanent solution to what should have been a temporary challenge in his life.

Here’s something I know about you today. Today you are facing a hard battle. And daily you choose to fight it – or not. How’s it going? And why are you doing the things that you do?

I had a chance to ask myself those questions several years ago. May 18th, 2012, I was in Moab, UT with a bunch of friends who go there every year to ride mountain bikes. Day one of the trip began perfectly. Clear, deep blue sky. Crisp morning air. Sitting in the Moab diner with biker breakfasts of pancakes and sausage, bacon and eggs, and biscuits and gravy we could look across Main Street and watch the sun warm the red rock wall of the Colorado River canyon.

We left the diner and hitched a ride to the Porcupine Rim trailhead, geared up, cranked the rest of the way to the summit, and started the adrenaline-infused downhill run through the willows. By this time a high overcast had moved in, providing some small mercy from what can be a torturous Utah-desert sun.

After freewheeling down the slope for about 45 minutes I came to a paved road crossing. I skipped up onto the asphalt, then down into the dirt on the other side. As I settled back into the single-track, I saw a section of random-sized rocks just ahead that I’d have to take on. Not a big deal – I’d already negotiated far worse several times that morning, so I didn’t think anything of it. Didn’t even slow down.

That’s the last thing I remember from the ride.

The next thing I remember is waking up… looking at the sky, no longer gray. The sun in its arrogance was making itself fully known on my face. I was still on the trail, but I wasn’t on my bike anymore. And I wasn’t moving. In fact, I couldn’t move my right arm. I could move everything else. But not my arm.

It is an indisputable fact of life that stuff happens. Fortune simply does challenge us on a regular basis with difficult situations. And we have an opportunity in those challenges to create meaning. As we consider that reality, it’s starting to feel like it might not be the challenges themselves that matter. We have no say in what Fortune throws at us. The opportunity seems to be showing up in how we respond.  So let’s ask the above questions another way. How are you responding today as Fortune is challenging you with difficult times?

Let’s pause here to summarize. Challenges. Are. Inevitable. We are all fighting hard battles. It’s how we respond that matters.

Let’s continue.

Ok, Mark. How inevitable are these challenges?

Let’s look back in history and see if we can find a pattern or two. How far back? Would 2500 years provide enough perspective?

In about 400 BCE Buddha imagined the Four Noble Truths. Truth number one: Life is suffering. Got it. Fifty years before that on the other side of the world, Plato was reminding his followers to “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” Check. Still in the Mediterranean but half a millennium later, Epictetus was teaching that “it is what it is.”

Sheesh. It’s looking pretty dire. Can we just skip over the Dark Ages and come right to the 20th century? Sure. In 1978 M. Scott Peck wrote his somewhat controversial book, The Road Less Traveled. Chapter one, page one, line one: “Life is suffering.” And we’re right back to Buddha.

Seriously? Is that the best we can hope for? Not at all. In fact, we shouldn’t place these declarations in a negative light. Every one of these individuals used those ideas as starting points in a conversation about how to find joy in an imperfect world, mandatory retirement age notwithstanding.

That morning in Moab I had a profound opportunity to join the conversation.

Pain began to build between my shoulder blades and at the base of my neck as I became more and more aware. With that awareness came clarity and I told myself I must remain still until I knew more. With absolute care not to allow my head to move I took inventory of my extremities. Left toes? Yep, they work. Right foot? Check. Left fingers? No problem. Right arm…?

Problem.

In the silence of that moment Fortune presented her challenge in great big letters across the sky: Your neck may be broken. Your right arm is gone. How are you going to respond?

My first response was, “Got it. And I’m not gonna be Superman.”

Back in the 1980s, actor Christopher Reeve played the titular role in a four-film Superman series. And although he was constantly busy during that decade, his Superman movies were the only ones I saw.

In preparation for one of his other movies, he learned to ride horses. And then in 1995 he had a devastating accident while doing just that. His neck was broken, and he spent his remaining years as a quadriplegic.

I knew all that and recognized instantly that his lot wasn’t necessarily going to be mine. If nothing changed from that moment, I knew I would still be able to walk, run, shake hands, give hugs, write notes and anything else in the universe that did not require two arms.

Something in my past had prepared me to see in my crisis everything I still had, and to focus on that rather than on what I had perhaps lost. I have no idea what that something was. I was 53 years old when these events took place. It could have been any of a number of life events, probably quite a few, that had occurred in the previous decades.

So let’s pause again at this point and come back to your hard battles. Has anything in your past prepared you to see what you still have in a crisis rather than what you’ve lost? Could this story maybe be that something? Are you able to today to make that mental shift?

Back to the story.

My mental preparation for battle began to solidify as I was regaining consciousness. The crisis was only beginning. Even with the best mindset I could muster in the moment, I recognized that if I were going to have the outcome that anyone would want, the right things had to happen and I had to avoid the wrong things.

All of those thoughts raced through my consciousness in an instant. I was only just becoming fully conscious when the next group of riders came along, found me lying there, pulled out their cell phones, called 911, and got an emergency response. So began the rescue that involved getting the ambulance up to me on the trail, me onto the back board, into the ambulance, and then back down the hill to the Moab emergency room where they took x-rays. And we found out that indeed my neck was broken.

Because x-rays can’t tell us everything we need to know about soft tissue, the doctors couldn’t know how badly my spinal cord was damaged. With a broken neck and a paralyzed arm, they thought they’d better figure that out. So they decided to evacuate me up to St. Mary’s hospital in Grand Junction and put me in an MRI machine.

Back on the gurney, out to the helipad, loaded into the chopper and strapped down again. As the helicopter lifted off for the short cruise to St. Mary’s, the chaos of the rescue melted away and I found myself thinking about the gravity of my situation.

I was being handled professionally by the medical experts who saw this sort of trauma all-too-frequently in Moab, but I knew that I was in a fragile state. My neck was broken, and my right arm was gone. There was still plenty that could go wrong. And despite believing that I could still escape Reeves’s fate, the question that came rushing in – that I couldn’t push away – was ‘how much worse is it gonna get?’ Was I gonna lose my left arm, too? What about my legs? Were they gonna stop working before I even got to Grand Junction? And if you go just a little bit further down that line of thinking you come to a pretty dark place. I won’t say it here – I’ll let you get there on your own. But suffice it to say I knew for the first time on a gut level something I’d known in my head for my entire life:

Tomorrow is not promised.

This is me on the gurney being loaded into the helicopter. That’s my then 18-year-old son standing beside me, saying goodbye to his dad with a broken neck.

The image of him standing beside me, doing what needed to be done, being the adult in the situation, was burned into my psyche during that gentle cruise beyond the LaSalle Mountains, northeast toward the Grand Mesa. I wasn’t finished raising him, his sister and two brothers. There were still things I needed to say to those I was close to. There were things I wanted to do with my kids that I hadn’t done yet. I started asking myself whether the things I had been doing that day were really the things I should have been doing.

But none of that mattered. Tomorrow was no longer promised. And strapped into that gurney as I was, there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.

The helicopter landed at St. Mary’s. They wheeled me into the MRI machine, did the test, and wheeled me back out again. The neurosurgeon came over to give me the news: “Yeah, Mark, your neck is broken – in five places. That’s the bad news. The good news is that there’s no spinal cord damage.”

“Thanks, Doc, that’s great news. But my arm is paralyzed…?”

“Well yes, the nerves that control your arm are badly bruised way back up at their roots. But because the bruise is outside the spinal column, your arm will likely recover.”

Sure enough, it was only a matter of hours before I began to regain function in my right hand.

At that point I was given a great gift from the Universe. Now it’s not what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “no foolin,’ Sport. You got to walk away from a broken neck.”

And that was indeed a nice gift. But what I’m talking about is what the surgeon did next. She trussed me up in a cervical collar and told me not to remove it for the next 90 days under any circumstances.

As you might imagine that sort of cramped my style during the summer of 2012. There were things I would have done that I couldn’t do with a cervical collar around my neck. Things I’d have seen, places I’d have gone.

This watershed event had brought my life to a sudden stop. And I was given the gift of stillness for a change. Three months to figure out how to respond to this challenge that Fortune had thrown my way.

So what did I think about during those long days and longer nights of hardly being able to move? I thought of a great friend and pilot colleague. His name happens to be Mark, same as mine. I thought of him for several reasons.

United Airlines, where we both work, is one of the carriers that was devastated by the events of 9/11. As it happened, one of the four captains on one of the four jets that went down that day was a close friend and mentor to my friend, Mark. It was an unimaginable loss. And in the aftermath of that horrific day Mark’s airline declared bankruptcy and cut his pay in half. At half pay he couldn’t make his mortgage payments, and he lost his home to foreclosure and personal bankruptcy. Then a few months before my accident they found two different kinds of cancer in two different parts of his body.

So let’s see. Friend murdered by terrorists. Career disaster. Foreclosure. Bankruptcy. Cancer times two. That’s a heavy list. But you’d never know any of that had happened to him unless you knew it had happened. He’s one of the most positive, optimistic, fun-to-be-around individuals I’ve ever known.

How can that dichotomy exist in any individual? How can it exist in the world?

I asked him that question. Here’s what he said. “You know, sometimes life kicks you where it hurts. And you can either lay there and moan, or you can get up and move on with what’s important.” Simple. Not necessarily easy.

In other words, every challenge brings a choice. You can choose to fight your battles. Or not.

There it was – his response to this Job (the Biblical character)-like series of challenges. He was, and still is, moving forward. And there, through him, was my challenge. Was I gonna lay there and moan, or was I gonna get up and move on with what’s important?

Of course, if you give a monkey three months and enough bananas, he’ll figure it out. So I did. And here I am, still fighting my hard battles – just like you.

Mind if I ask a few more questions as we enter the home stretch?

What watershed event has brought your life to a sudden stop?

More importantly, how are you responding? Are you resolving today, tomorrow, next month, next year to get up and do what needs to be done? Are you embracing the challenges that history has taught us are inevitable? Are you taking the opportunity to create meaning out of those challenges?

How would it be if today as you fight your hard battles you recognized that it’s not what happens in life that matters – it’s how we respond?

A few moments ago we looked to ancient thought leaders for what they had to say about the inevitability of Fortune’s tests. Epictetus, Plato, and Buddha all suggested that we might use their observations as starting points in a conversation about how to find joy in an imperfect world Let’s conclude by going back again to the philosophy of the ages. Further back than all our selected philosophers. Let’s go back 3,000 years to one of the oldest philosophies of all.

The Judeo-Christian tradition expressed in the book of Isaiah promises that if we resolve to do the things we were put on this earth to do, embracing the reality and opportunity of challenge, and fight hard to create meaning out of the inevitable watershed events that bring our lives to sudden stops, then we shall have a song. And gladness of heart.

I think I’m ok with that. I think that’s all I really want. How about you?

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Thanks for reading.

Link to Mark’s book, The Symphony of Your Life

The Symphony of Your Life    

The Symphony of Your Life on YouTube

Mark graduated from the USAF Academy in 1982. After nine years as a pilot on active duty, he left the military to join a commercial airline. In addition to flying B-737s around the country, Hardcastle spends time in the Rocky Mountains and serves on the artistic staff of the Colorado Children’s Chorale. He lives in Centennial, Colorado, with his wife and four children. Need some help figuring out why you’re on this planet? Want to talk about discovering your mission and purpose? Contact Mark today at 720.840.8361 to schedule a free personal consultation. He can also deliver an inspirational keynote or workshop for your organization! email: mark@symphonyofyourlife.com for information.

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