After church we went out to eat for Mother's Day.  We are notoriously violent eaters and when we had slopped up the last bit from our plates, Andrew asked if I would let him rent a video.  We headed to the rental shop.  It was our goal to rent "What About Bob" a great Bill Murray movie (one of the funniest movies I have seen), but they didn't have it.  We decided instead on "Rocky", but ended up mistakenly renting "Rocky Balboa".  When we got home and realized what we had done, everyone was bummed, but we decided to watch it anyway. 

The surprisingly good movie depicts an older Rocky making a comeback as a way, in part, to exorcise his demons and find some sense of purpose for his life.  It is pretty cool, you will have to watch it sometime.  But the movie itself is not the motivation for this blog, but rather one of Rocky's lines from the movie.  He was talking to his 20-something son about making his way through life when he said, "Life is vicious.  It is going to hit you hard.  It doesn't matter how hard you hit back, it only matters how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward."

All of a sudden I was paying attention.  I had never heard things put that way before, but it was so true.  You are going to get hit.  You are going to face tough times and major disappointments.  Forget about making it through life without them.  All that matters is whether or not you will keep moving forward, crawling, stumbling, whatever. 

If you have been watching our show you will remember that last season I hit and lost a giant buck in Episode 17 through a fluke of bad luck.  It was a really nice buck.  I was crushed and stated in the end of that episode that life is full of disappointments, it is what you do with them that shapes you.  I hoped I would handle the setback well.  (Will Prucha found the buck while shed hunting our farm this winter.  We showed that unfortunate ending in a recent epsiode called Finding More Dead Bucks.)

As it turned out, I didn't get nearly as down about the disappointment as I would have earlier in my hunting career.  It is just a deer - a big one - but still only a deer nonetheless.  They aren't people, and in the grander scheme of life, when we are lying on our death beds we won't be thinking, "Man I wish I had shot one more big buck."  We will be thinking, "Man, I wish I could spend just one more day with my family, hug them one more time."  So I am learning about perspective, and that buck was just another in a long line of teachers on the subject.

In this journal I sometimes use hunting lessons to teach bigger life lessons.  I figure I am now old, with enough perspective that I can pull that off.  In hunting as in life, you are going to get knocked down a lot.  The question is: will you struggle back to your feet and keep moving forward, keep fighting the good fight?

It was a lightning bolt of wisdom from a surprising source.