Problems. Your fuel.

The next time you are out running errands, stop. Take a moment to sit down on a nearby bench and look at the people that are sharing that moment in time with you.

Strangers. Faces without names busily going about their day, consumed in trying to head problems off at the pass. Each one of these people you don’t know have a story like yours.

Your story has chapters that were not written by your hand. Passages of the book of your life that, had you been given a choice, you would never have allowed to be included. That car accident that you were in. A drunk driver wrote off your car and, while everyone was ok, your finances were hit badly when the insurance company decided to play silly games. When Aunt Dorothy died it hit all of you hard. Uncle Stan and she were the life and soul of the party. “Dotty” was your go-to in all situations, bad or good. When you lost your job after it was discovered that Sarah in accounts had been embezzling, (everyone knew it, but it couldn’t be proven), and caused the company to fold, you spent a long time unemployed and that hurt all of you. It was as though you were lurching from one crisis to another, but you were taking the blows like a champ.

Again you look at the faces that walk by. The mother with the two crying toddlers over there. She’s just been told that she has two weeks to find the rent that went up yesterday. The guy over there with the beard — he lost his brother in the Falklands conflict in the early 1980’s and he still misses him dearly. The couple looking at the baby clothes through the window are trying again for a baby and don’t know why they are finding it so hard to become parents. The kid with the purple hair over there with the skateboard hasn’t spoken in two weeks. His parents are getting divorced and he can’t be convinced it’s not his fault.

Burdens. Problems. Personal disasters that are goliaths in everyone’s lives that cannot be halved or shared. But somehow, with each passing day, one foot is placed in front of another and they march on. They have to.

You think back to your problems. Climbing out of that wreckage that was 2009, you lost a lot. When the flooding hit your house you had just enough time to get many items upstairs, but the furniture, the carpet, the walls… all ruined. But they all saw you roll up your sleeves and clench your fists. Again, you had to. That determined stubbornness that you inherited from your father — “Grumpy Jeff” they called him at the port — kicked in hard when it was time for you to be strong. You smile to yourself and giggle at little picturing your father looking up at the TV, complaining about the “idiots playing that noise that isn’t music” before looking back down at his newspaper.

All of us have a story riddled with dark episodes. The irksome persistence of time, relentlessly insisting it needs to keep moving forward, won’t allow you to pause for breath. You’ve been keeping pace with it and despite the occasional grey hair or the extra line in the crow’s feet by your eyes (when did they appear?), you’ve stood up to all of it. While it’s true that you now bear both metaphorical and literal scars and a few bruises, you’re still standing like the belligerent oak tree that refuses to succumb to the wind. It’s almost like you welcome a challenge, daring it to test you.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and Sharon from the gym who you did your Spartan Trifecta with, shows you something else they do at Spartan and makes you look at her cellphone. “Hurricane Heat!” she excitedly shrieks. “That thing with the teamwork and the logs and stuff we saw them do when we finished our Trifecta, you remember? We need to do that.”

A flurry of images from your past flash through your mind’s eye as you watched the video of what looks like some people carrying …what is that? Bleachers? It looks heavy, but you remember how you’ve open-palm bitch-slapped problems away that were harder than this. It dawns on you that you are already strong enough. You always have been. It’s just that the penny had never dropped before.

Everything clicks into place with the same intense satisfaction of a well-oiled and perfectly engineered piece of machinery.

Life? It doesn’t stand a chance against you.

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