… and he fails. Yet. Yet. It was beautiful at the same time. Because he was chasing a dream.
Chasing a dream is nearly impossible these days. Why? Because everyone is so grounded in their own realities that they keep telling you that your dreams are silly, that they’ll never come true. We all have our own dreams, our own hopes and our own desires, each coming with their own set of fears.
But life is about overcoming these fears, about facing them head on, about that beautiful moment, that awakening. It’s about that rare moment of clarity, like when Will was coming down the spine of the hill while he friend was on a log.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_aFAXzVZns
That was Will’s existential moment, that was his awakening into a world that was far too cruel for his understanding. That was a mouthful of wood chips.
It has always been mankind’s desire to overcome gravity, to be able to defy that 9.8m/s2 that defines our very existence, only to find failure at every turn. But it was the bold who thumbed their nose at that number and were able to momentarily overcome gravity, even if just a little bit. It is because of them that we have planes in the air, that we’ve sent human beings to the moon and that we have landed rovers on the surface of Mars and an asteroid.
No one told this kid, in his rashguard, MMA trunks and gloves, that he wasn’t supposed to fly, that the laws of gravity and physics dictated that the amount of force he’d need to exert to overcome gravity to land that perfect off-the-cage superman punch in an Anthony Pettis-like feat of daring would be so insurmountable that the odds of him pulling it off in a rather shoddy cage were next to zero. You might call him foolish, but he defied the odds in an attempt to overcome the laws of existence and to chase his dream.
9.8m/s2 is a very real figure and on this day he was not able to overcome those odds. He kept fighting, though, he pushed through and was able to win his amateur MMA fight against a man that resembled a sea monster (or maybe it was Bucky Boyd?). Murphy’s Law was proven here, in this fight.
I’m reminded of the words of Cooper from Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar here.
“These moments when we dare to aim higher To break barriers To reach for the stars To make the unknown known We count these moments as our proudest achievements But we’ve lost all of that Or perhaps we’ve just forgotten That we are still pioneers That we’ve barely begun And that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us Because our destiny lies above us”
We are taught an important lesson here today, that lesson being to never give up. Never stop believing in yourself and never stop to listen to the doubters. Just remember to work hard before you try to make your dreams come true, or else you’ll end up flopping on a cage in front of two dozen people who are laughing at you and that video will be posted on YouTube for everyone to laugh at you. Sheesh.
