We Are All Heroes
My heroes are the ones who survived doing it wrong, who made mistakes, but recovered from them.
- - - Bono
I once saw a Dustin Hoffman movie called “Hero.” He played a man who performed the first selfless gesture of his life when he reluctantly helped save injured passengers from a roadside plane crash. Then he disappeared.
What I liked most about the movie was the way they depicted him. He didn’t have a big S on his shirt and fly through the air. He didn’t wear an iron suit that gave him superhuman physical strength and energy. He didn’t have the ability to cling to the sides of buildings. He didn’t even have the urge to help people. He just happened to be at the site at the time of the crash and he did what was necessary. All the while, he was annoyed by the whole thing and when he was done, he didn’t wait around for kudos. He just walked away, glad that it was over.
Before Covid, I used to do strength and agility sessions with a trainer who conducted his workout sessions in a gym for elite female athletes. My exercises were mild as I watched in awe as the girls performed lunges on the balance beam and tried to do a graceful dismount without injuring themselves. They walked on their hands, they spun around on the uneven bars, pushed off the vault and did multiple back flips. During my sessions, any time I felt tired or bored, all I had to do was look up and see someone flying through the air.
These girls looked like heroines, they were, but one day, my coach told me, “The training you’re doing at this stage in your life is every bit as powerful as the girls who are training for the Olympics. You are just as much of a hero as they are.”
We aren’t gold medal winners unless one of you is reading this blog, but many of us are gifted in a quieter way. The sister of a friend is the family breadwinner, working and taking care of her autistic son. A man I know helps people die. Another friend writes books and offers people a way to maneuver grief. I know someone whose entire family is battling cancer and heart disease and she manages to laugh whenever we speak. I knew someone else is no longer with us who lost her legs to frostbite and she powered around on prosthetics like nothing had happened. These are all heroic acts and the list goes on.
When I was a professional ballet dancer, twirling and jumping on the tips of my toes was extraordinary as I showed up for class every morning, went on ten-week, one-night stand bus tours across the country and performed on blisters and sprains. That was heroic, even though I didn’t know it at the time.
If you look deep inside, there is a hero living there, even if you can't see him or her. It doesn’t matter what you pull off, you can feel that power emerge. You don't have to be an athlete, a power ranger or a ninja. You don’t have to be publicly celebrated. Most likely, your greatest accomplishments are not so dramatic but they mean as much. Maybe you're extremely compassionate with other people. Maybe you can listen so well, it heals someone. Maybe you’re raising children. Maybe you feed hungry people or you have an extraordinary ability to make people laugh in the toughest of circumstances like my friend, Rhoni, who excels in both. These are the everyday deeds that take stamina to pull off. If you help one other person to find the strength to be themselves, you’ve done your part.
It takes a commitment to finding courage and never giving up. Today, we are all heroes for withstanding the madness of the political machinations that are happening. We can either roll up in a ball on the floor and weep or we can stand in the light and do what we can to make changes. No matter how dim it is, it’s always there and it takes stamina to remember that.
An Aesop’s fable:
A lion was asleep in the forest when a mouse came walking by and inadvertently ran across the lion’s nose. The lion laid his huge paw on the tiny creature, ready to kill her. The mouse promised to repay the lion if he would let her go. The lion was amused that the mouse thought she could ever help him in any way but in an act of kindness, he let her go.
Some days later, the lion got caught a hunter’s net. He filled the forest with angry roaring and the mouse heard him. She ran to him and although she was afraid the hunter would see her and kill her, she gnawed on the rope and set the lion free. She proved that even a mouse can find the courage to help a lion.
I love the following quote from Hercules:
“A true hero isn’t measured by the size of his strength, but rather by the strength of his heart.”