There’s a path all human beings trod. We are not long on it when it forks — the right; the path is clear and clean, and in the far off distance a heavenly vista, with sunlight streaming through flittering verdant leaves — the left, the path unbroken, dense undergrowth, no light, no discernible way.
Our eyes lock on the right fork. We barely notice the left as we gleefully turn and take the glorious path. We are not long on it when a crack, crunch, thunderous sound erupts from a giant sequoia toppling to the ground, right on that glorious path, its height and girth so immense there is no way for you to climb over, under or go around. Your way is stopped cold.
No rhyme, no reason is given for the obstacle now blocking your way. All you know is that what you saw as your future path is no more. It’ll never be an option for you again. You suffer scrapes and bruises from the tree trunk fall. You’re not mortally wounded; it just feels as if you are.
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This scenario comes to all human beings who dare to strive, to trek into the unknown, hoping for a bright future. On the walk, when we take it, being so young and inexperienced with life, the blockade hurts. It really, really hurts.
You held out such promise for that fork in the road. It looked perfect in every way. All you had to do was walk down it, and the world would be your oyster, and you, nestled safely inside, are made beautifully whole as a shimmering pearl.
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Now, you are stopped. You still live and breathe, and life is still offering you two choices as it did with that forked path — take the left fork, the one presenting as an abyss, and work like a grunt with machete in hand to carve out a path for yourself, one slashed dirty, prickly weed and unearthed root at a time… or return to the very start, and choose to die before you’ve ever lived.
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My late father would hate that I’m telling you his tale of woe. He’d probably not speak to me for months, or who knows, maybe ever. But the one gift my father gave me was learning from his mistakes, and boy, did he make a bucket full… but don’t we all?
My father had a Tom Hanks Dead Eyes moment.
(Backstory: Listen to the podcast “Dead Eyes,” hosted by Connor Ratliff, where he dissects his life experience about losing a bit part in Tom Hanks’ episode of Band of Brothers. If you don’t listen to Dead Eyes, you’re an idiot, and there’s no hope for you. Go listen. Even if you stop reading me. It’s the lesson you, we all, need to learn or re-remember learning. If you don’t completely hate me after listening, return here and read this article ’til the end. I promise your hate for me won’t increase, and you might just forgive me. Life is full of weird shit like that.)
William “Leigh” Thompson was a bright, exceptionally intelligent farm boy hearkening from the Orangeville, Ontario region, WNW of Toronto. In 1932, Leigh was 18, and he was excited. His Aunt May, a well-heeled relative in Toronto, had promised to pay for his tuition to go to university, to study something important that would get him off the farm and into a stellar career to become a Somebody.
When it came time for Leigh to apply, at the last minute and with no reason, his Aunt May didn’t fork over the money, and my father had that figurative sequoia crash in front of his heavenly fork in the road of life.
Flash forward so many decades, and my father went to his grave blaming his aunt for why he didn’t become a Somebody.
It’s ironic, actually, because he went onto be a Constable in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and in later years the Head Buyer for General Electric. He had much success. He had people noticing him and looking up at him. He looked so dashing in his police uniform, my mother fell in love with the man. He made a mark wherever he went. He arrested bad men. He had high-flying liquid lunches at Toronto’s York Hotel. He had underlings. He made important decisions. And when he chose to drink over having that career, even the big boss from General Electric came to our house and asked my mother what he needed to do to get Leigh back on track.
And with all this success — with the adulation, the prestige, the power and the money — none of it mattered. When the alcohol took over, he would return to the sad story of his aunt May and how she’d stolen his chance at being a Somebody.
My father, like all the rest of humanity, had a choice: take the left fork and carve his own path, or return to the start and die before he began to live. Leigh Thompson chose to die, a slow, slogging suicide by drink, all the while blaming others for his downfall.
In effect, my father was not Connor Ratliff. He didn’t have Connor's courage or fortitude or grit to machete through that overgrown left fork in the road. He had envisioned the heavenly right fork, taken a glimpse at the serene vista, smelled the fragrant scent of stratospheric success, and when it was snatched from him, he thought, there was no more fight in him to carry on. For the next 53 years, he would walk through life as the living dead.
Flash forward again to my life, and my hopeful stellar future, where I worked through school to afford to go to university. I achieved a university degree and a technological school associate degree, and I began on my way to that dreamed for a career in public relations. Then, in less than 5 years, I fell deathly ill, and was forced to retire from the 9 to 5 work world right there and then, and forever. That figurative sequoia tree fell right in front of me, too.
I was as my father as was Connor Ratliff. We all suffered from Dead Eyes.
But Connor and I chose not to die before we had lived. We walked over to that feral left fork and with machete in hand, sliced and slashed, grunted and groaned our way forward, creating a new, if not rough-hewn, path to an unseen future that in the end, was the right path for us after all.
Such a serendipity path would have been on offer to my father, too, if he had the courage to take it. No farm work, no yard work, no building a retaining wall out of fieldstone in the sweltering Ontario summer heat would stop the man, but when it came to working for the title of Somebody, his grit disintegrated like ashes on a campfire heap.
Failure: I’ve learned from my father that failure is the KEY to success. Yes, at that moment of failure, you are so very hurt. If you’re Connor Ratliff, you go buy a record in a record store. If you’re me, in the dead of night on countless nights I cried alone while my family slept, blinded by that failure, grieving the loss of what I “thought” was me, the Barbara Thompson, a Somebody.
Connor went on to work at a bookstore for 13 years, eventually returning to acting once he had processed his Dead Eye moment.
I did roughly the same as Connor. I learned to live with my illness and slowly reinvented myself, doing what I had always done best in my day job, what I still could do being as sick as I was, and that was being an editor and being a writer.
It took years to get well enough to write full time, and took more years after that to up my skill and hone my craft, and the work of being a writer continues, just as being an artist continues for Connor.
Connor Ratliff and I chose that left fork, and we’ve carved our own paths. Every inch we have fought for and worked for, and none of it has been easy, but all of it has been satisfying, for not an ounce was easily given. We earned every step.
The Moral of the Dead Eyes Story: Tom Hanks wasn’t Connor’s bad guy. Aunt May wasn’t my father’s bad gal. My illness wasn’t bad. Those figurative sequoia trees felled in front of us may have been the events we needed to force us to carve our own paths, to not take the road more easily travelled, to become for ourselves our own versions of that elusive Somebody.
My late father failed to see that more valuable option. Connor and I saw the way. For years, the going as tough, holy hell was it tough, Connor would wholeheartedly agree. But if asked, would Connor or I have had it any other way, knowing what we know now? Our answer: No. Connor needed Tom to say No. I needed that illness to say No. We were on the wrong fork on our road. At the time, we just didn’t know it.
~~~
If I had one wish, I wish my father could have his life to do all over again, or at least live long enough to see how he had taught me to fight when the going got so very Dead Eyes rough. Maybe he’d be proud of me as I think Tom Hanks turned out to be proud of Connor, seeing how his dead eyed actor chose the road anything but scenic, but making the trip oh, so memorable.
Success Life Hack: If you’re 20-something, and you think you know the meaning of that word, think again. Sometimes your greatest failure ends up offering the road to your greatest success.
My only regret: I wish my illness could sit down with me on a studio
set, so we, too, could have a long chat like Connor had with Tom. As I
listened to that interview, I envisioned that sequoia tree trunk
disappearing in front of Connor’s eyes, and this time, he had no desire
to travel down that heavenly path. That, in a nutshell, is freedom. In
the end, Tom Hanks gave Connor that.