Book 300 - A Year of Magical Learning

Reflection Title: I Can Imagine!

Book – The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumphs by Ryan Holiday (Part 1 of 2)

Book Description:

The book draws its inspiration from stoicism, the ancient Greek philosophy of enduring pain or adversity with perseverance and resilience. Stoics focus on the things they can control, let go of everything else, and turn every new obstacle into an opportunity to get better, stronger, tougher. As Marcus Aurelius put it nearly 2000 years ago: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

Ryan Holiday shows us how some of the most successful people in history—from John D. Rockefeller to Amelia Earhart to Ulysses S. Grant to Steve Jobs—have applied stoicism to overcome difficult or even impossible situations. Their embrace of these principles ultimately mattered more than their natural intelligence, talents, or luck.

If you’re feeling frustrated, demoralized, or stuck in a rut, this book can help you turn your problems into your biggest advantages. And along the way it will inspire you with dozens of true stories of the greats from every age and era.

Reflection:

On April 22cd, 2020, I watched my 39-day-old first born child, named Emilia Quinn Sears, take her final breaths on this Earth while her mother held her tightly in our NICU hospital room at Riley’s Hospital for Children in Indianapolis, IN.

At around 7am on 4/22/20, I drove home childless from the hospital in complete shock. I had not a single thought in my mind as I pulled back into our driveway and collapsed into our bed.

When I awoke a few hours later, all I felt was nothingness. Literally, there wasn’t a single thought in my mind. My whole world had come to a crashing halt. My universe had been blown up before my very eyes over the proceeding 4 days as my daughter fought with everything she had to recover from an emergency surgery that ultimately took her life.

After the dust cleared in that mid-afternoon day and I snapped back into reality that my daughter was gone, the only thing I could think of is…WHAT WOULD EMILIA DO?

That answer was easy, we fight!

Since the moment Emilia had been unexpectedly born at only 22 weeks Old and weighing only 1lb and 1 ounce, I had watched this remarkable little child do it fight and endure through everything that life had thrown at her. She would never quit, and I wasn’t about to now either.

I knew what I needed to do. I got out of bed and forced myself to do something…anything. What I decided to do was to continue writing in my journal that I had been keeping to document Emilia’s journey in hopes to one day be able to share it with her when she was older and could process all that she had gone through at such a young age. Since I could no longer do that, I decided to keep writing to her anyway about this new reality that we were both facing apart from each other which was now separated by time and space.

That is exactly what I did. Each day I sat down to write, I felt her presence. Day after day we met each other back at the keyboard to chat. We mostly talked about the pain of being a part from each other in the beginning. That resulted in her book called I Can’t Imagine which was primarily about processing what we both had been through together. For the first 6 months, all we did was cry together every morning as we worked through our pain. We decided to call this story I Can’t Imagine because that was the truth. Neither of us could have ever imagined this as our lives when we my wife first informed us that we would be Father and Daughter back in October of 2019.

However, as we continued to talk each day we slowly began to accept our new reality. What we talked about shifted from pain, sadness, and living a life apart from eachother, to figuring out what was really important in this world. We talked about our why, values, and our unique purpose in this world. Those conversations started to spur our imaginations, spark our creativity and curiosity, and bring joy back in our life.

Eventually, and bird by bird, those conversations writing each morning began to morph from the theme of I Can’t Imagine into I Can Imagine as time went on.

Emilia and I decided to embrace our reality and figure out a way to stay connected. We choose our shared values as the way. Whenever we are doing stuff we love, we are doing it together. We imagine that we are doing those things we love together and magically there we are. Whether it be learning something new, writing our thoughts, taking a long run, playing a tennis match, etc. We are in this together. This became our way to stay connected and grow in our relationship as father and daughter even if we couldn’t physically be with each other in this world.

We called this Living for 2 and we have been doing more and more together every day and have no plans to stop.

Question: How can you turn your I Can’t Imagine into I Can Imagine?

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Links:

What is The Year of Magical Learning? An Introduction

YOML Podcast Discussion - Coming Soon

YOML Bookstore - The Obstacle is the Way