There Are No Obstacles

I can be impatient with people. I can be very impatient with people who see a million reasons something can NOT be accomplished. I like to come up with a million reasons anything can be accomplished. It's just the way I think. That's the kind of hairpin I am. (An old expression my mom used to use. "That's the kind of hairpin she is." I have no idea what it means -- it just means what it means.)

I was talking to a friend about this -- a woman lawyer -- about the notion of not being thrown off by what others perceive as obstacles. My friend, the lady lawyer, just won a very big case against a very well-known male lawyer who'd actually been bragging around town that he had the case sewn up, she had no chance. He'd won 20 in a row for his firm, and this one should be no different. Everyone, including him, assumed he'd ace it. He didn't. She knocked him out of the box. It was a big upset.

She is not arrogant and she never counted on winning. She felt the cards were stacked against her, but she ignored all that and just did the job at hand.

She asked me how I came by that attitude -- that there are no obstacles -- where I learned it. And, of course, I have to thank my dad, God Bless Him, for teaching me that. He was enormously resourceful and resilient, as well as creative and funny. He NEVER took NO for an answer. No was something other people thought. He never bought into the idea of something not being possible.

He taught me it was a losing strategy to waste any time talking yourself into why you couldn't do something. "What kind of fool would do that?!?" he would say incredulously.

I was telling her about him, and it occurred to me the piece I wrote the morning after his death "When My Dad Wakes Up Today" was all about that. Sometimes I'll write something and I don't even get what it is that's good about it -- it happens often. It took me two years to understand what that piece was about.

It starts by saying "When my dad wakes up today, the first thing he will notice is that he is dead. But he'll that that in stride ..." And that's exactly what he taught me -- there are no obstacles. He always looked at a situation from this starting point. Even if he found out by some fluke he happened to be dead, it was a mere detail, easily overlooked, nothing one should get worked up over or dwell on, instead, you just figure a way round it. The whole essay is about that.

So today, I want to thank my dad for teaching me that very important way of seeing the world -- that there are no obstacles -- and acknowledge that he was exactly right -- he's right here with me, alive as can be in my thoughts, my words, my life and his death is a mere detail, something I take in stride.