Tag: dreams

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Moment of Truth

Every actor can tell you about the nightmares.

I don’t mean the ones that confine themselves to the world of sleep, like showing up for an audition and discovering it’s opening night, or picking up a script and discovering that all the words have turned into Esperanto.  Dreams like that are part of any high-stress situation – after all, how many of us have had the Final Exam Dream™ years after graduation?

No, these are the nightmares that turn into reality. A set that falls on you from behind. A prop that disintegrates in your hand. A costume that goes missing mid-way through the show. The best ones turn into “war stories” years later, proof that the show must go on. But there’s always the fear of the worst. The one that breaks you.

Long ago, the worst happened to Sir Ian Holm.

That’s when the freeze hit.

It sounds unthinkable now. To be honest, it sounded unthinkable then. When Sir Ian – who passed away Friday at the age of 88– took the stage in 1976 for “The Iceman Cometh,” he was already a respected actor, even a Tony winner. But all at once, the gears locked midway through the show… and one of the worst cases of stage fright on record set in.

“Here I am, supposed to be talking to you … there are you, expecting me to talk,” he remembered telling the audience in his memoirs. He fumbled his way past the actors, off stage, and all the way to the dressing room, where he was found curled in a fetal position unable to return.

That could have been the end.

Actors go to a strange place – an intersection where illusion meets reality, where the personal ties to the universal. It’s a beautiful bridge, but it can be a fragile one. And when it breaks, there’s suddenly nowhere to go but down.

Most of us know the feeling, I think. Even if we’ve never set foot on a stage.

And that’s because most of us have been at a moment where life completely fell apart.

The loved one that was lost.

The perfect health that suddenly wasn’t.

The job that went away.

The world that changed into something unrecognizable.

It may have come without warning or with a “check engine” light that went ignored for years. Either way, it’s devastating, and not just because of the crisis itself. As I’ve said before, we like to believe that we’re in control of life – that we can make plans, anticipate problems, set ourselves up for a good present and a better future.

When we’re reminded of how little control we really have, it hits hard. It’s terrifying.

And the scariest part is facing the question “What next?”

Are we just the circumstances that came before us, breaking when they’re shattered, melting when they’re dissolved? Or is there something more that can emerge and grow?

I’ve had to take that look at myself. Maybe you have, too. It’s not comfortable. But in that place of truth, when we stand stripped of what came before, possibility can be born.

It doesn’t have to be the end. Just an end. And therefore, a beginning as well.

Sir Ian certainly found it so.

It was years before he ever stepped on a stage again. But he rebuilt his bridge on the screen. From “Chariots of Fire” to “The Fifth Element,” from “Alien” to “The Lord of the Rings,” he won over entire generations who had never known him through anything but the movies. And whether he was a determined track coach or the legendary Bilbo Baggins, the truth of who he was and what he had to say shone through.

The freeze didn’t have to be fatal. For him. Or for us.

That’s a dream worth holding on to.

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Now Starring

“Daddy, look!”

I smiled – with Missy, “Daddy” is more of a job description than a title – and came over to the table. She stabbed her finger eagerly at the coffee table book, before turning more pages, and then more.

“Look! Look!”

From the pages leaped star fields, the points of brilliance crowding the page like sand on a beach. And then nebulae … and galaxies …. and planets. Some of the beauty was practically next door; far more of it was farther away than could be traveled in a hundred lifetimes.

But all of it, every last photo in the book from the Hubble Space Telescope, had captured Missy’s eyes and imagination. Our disabled ward is often a woman of few words, but she didn’t need them this time. Her face said everything that needed saying.
“WOW!!!”

She had been ambushed by wonder.

I’ve been there. I think we all have. It might be while watching the Northern California ocean at night, or seeing a blanket of stars above the Rockies, or an unexpected strain of music that lifts you beyond every cloud. It might be something quiet, even ordinary to the outside world … but not to you. Never to you.

Those may be the moments when I unmistakably feel the strength of hope.

Consider. Except for a few primal things, like loud noises, most fears have to be learned. It’s why the toddler years can be so unnerving for any adults nearby, as the little ones reach out to explore a world with no awareness of routine dangers – the electric socket, the heavy book on the end table, the doggie that might not like having his fur pulled.

Some of the fears and cautions we learn are of that sort, the awareness that keeps our impulses from leading us into harm’s way. But we teach others that are less beneficial – suspicions, prejudices, hatreds that inflict pain rather than avoiding it. Almost 70 years ago, South Pacific sang out the truths we’re still dealing with now:

 

You’ve got to be taught, before it’s too late,

Before you are six, or seven, or eight,

To hate all the people your relatives hate,

You’ve got to be carefully taught.

 

And then, there’s wonder.

It’s not something that’s taught, though a good teacher can lead one to it, and help shape it when it comes to light. You find wonder. You discover it. You come upon it and claim it as a gift.

At its most basic, wonder reminds us that we’re connected to something larger than our everyday view of the world. It takes off the blinkers, gives us perspective. At its most powerful, it can be a fuel for dreams and thus for reaching out, because few dreams of any size can be carried out by one person acting alone.

It’s not taught … but it can be sought. And in a world where fears try to crowd out hopes like weeds in a garden, it needs to be.

We build our walls high. So we need to be ready to climb. Wonder can come anywhere, but we help it most when we test our own limits – when we’re ready to risk a new experience, meet a new person, take our mind somewhere it hasn’t been before. Whether it’s the limitless reaches of space or the garden plot you’ve always meant to try out, all of it can serve as a step to something greater.

The clouds above are thick. But if we keep walking, we can find the stars.

Some of them are shining in Missy’s eyes right now.

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Walking on Dreams

“Look a’ that!”

When I hear those words and that tone, I know what I’m likely to find. I glance to where Missy’s finger is stabbing the magazine page and I’m not disappointed.

“Whoa,” I say appreciatively. “Cool shoes, Miss!”

Anyone who knows our disabled ward knows she has an eye for footwear, the brighter the better. Her sneakers are usually a shade of hot pink most often seen on Barbie dolls, cotton candy and pre-teen birthday cakes with extra frosting. Her current pair literally glow in the dark, not that they need to – even in broad daylight, every eye in the room is pulled to them like Superman to a bank robbery.

“I want a pair like those!” is the common refrain, with a smile and a laugh. My wife Heather even went beyond words to action; she and Missy now have matching Day-Glo footwear. Strategically placed, they may even save us money on nightlights, so there are all kinds of side benefits to be had.

But Missy’s dreams race far ahead of her feet.

Go through a magazine with her, even for a short while, and you will discover every wild, elaborate or fancy pair of shoes to be had. High heels with elaborate fastenings. Pumps with sequins. Shoes straight off the runway, with no practical application at all – ah, but this isn’t about practicality, is it? This is about imagination.

“Look a’ ma shoes.”

Missy’s cerebral palsy rules out nearly every single pair, of course. Her balance is carefully maintained at each step, even in sneakers with good soles and great support; put her in even a low heel and the fun would quickly become dangerous. Were she ever to spend more time in a wheelchair, Heather and I agree, one of the few consolations would be the amount of footwear that would be opened up to her.

And so, she dreams. It’s fun, even harmless, so long as she doesn’t actually step into anything that can’t hold her up.

At this point in the election calendar, Missy may have a lot of company.

Anyone who’s been giving even a glance to the political news – and I can’t really blame you if that isn’t you – has been seeing constant reports of “surges,” presidential candidates catching fire who are sure to be the Next Big Thing. The spotlight may be on Ben Carson, or Bernie Sanders, or the Trump card himself, but the message is always the same: look over here, a star is about to be born!

“Look at that!”

It can be fun to see the enthusiasm (or maybe frightening, depending on the candidate and your side of the aisle) and speculate on the possibilities. But like the shoes in Missy’s catalogs, there’s not a lot of support there.

This is the preseason. Maybe even training camp.

This is the stretch of time that once spurred talk about Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain. This is when Howard Dean was a superstar and Bill Bradley a hopeful.

This is six months before the primaries get started. A lot can happen in six months. And usually does.

In short, it’s dream season.

And it’s worth remembering.

By all means, get fired up for someone. It’s good to care, great to be involved. But this early in the game, take each report of a surge with a few shakers of salt. Meteoric rises are common at this stage. So are equally-meteoric falls.

Maybe your guy or gal really is The One. If that’s your leaning, great. Work to make it so. But don’t be seduced into thinking it’s all over but the laurel wreaths. As the SEALs like to say, the only easy day was yesterday. The long work is still ahead.

Dreams are fun, even necessary. But the support has to be there.

If it comes in glow-in-the-dark pink, that’s a bonus.

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The Impossible Dreams

It’s been rabbit season for a while now. And I’m loving it.

More specifically, it’s been “Harvey” season. And after a year’s break from theatre, I’m very fortunate to have been caught by the world’s kindest man and his giant invisible friend with the pointy ears. A friend of mine was once in a similar state of theatre withdrawal and wound up agreeing, sight unseen, to direct the first show that came his way – which happened to be “Oliver!”

“Oliver,” he said in a daze after hanging up the phone. “That’s the one with 50 kids in it, isn’t it?”

Theatre withdrawal. It’s a terrible and awesome thing.

Truth to tell, this is a show I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. (And a good thing, too, considering it involved two months of rehearsal with a little time off for Christmas.) There is a short list of scripts that I consider “drop everything” plays, where nothing short of blizzard, flood or alien invasion could keep me from trying out. At the top of that list are “Harvey” and “Man of La Mancha,” the musical about Don Quixote.

That’s not an accident.

In a way, both plays are the same story viewed from a slightly different angle. Both are about a man who walked away from mundane reality and embraced a dream. His world doesn’t understand. His family thinks he’s crazy. But his own life is an infinitely richer, more appealing place because of it – so appealing that it even threatens to draw others in despite themselves.

“I’ve wrestled with reality for over 40 years,” Elwood P. Dowd tells a bewildered doctor, “and I’m happy to state that I finally won out over it.”

“Too much sanity may be madness,” Don Quixote’s alter ego muses at one point. “And maddest of all, to see life as it is, and not as it should be!”

That’s something that’s inherently appealing to an actor. After all, we spend a fair amount of time walking in dreams ourselves, treating fiction as true and living with people who never were. We create entire families – cast, crew, audience – from the sheer power of that dream. And if we’re lucky, we carry a piece of it with us long after the curtain goes down.

Crazy? I’m sure many of our friends and family think so, especially after weeks of late nights and hastily grabbed dinners. But essential, too.

To paraphrase another “Harvey” character, it’s our dreams that make us who we are.

Oh, it’s possible to live without dreams. Look around. The daily news seems filled with the consequences of the oh-so-practical people more concerned with being right than doing right, where winning justifies anything, where grand visions matter less than seizing a small advantage today. Politics, sports, business – in some ways, it’s a world more hostile to the Elwoods and Quixotes of society than ever.

But once in a while, something lifts us higher.

Once in a while, we gape as a spacecraft lands on a comet or a rover explores Mars. Or we marvel together at the adventures of a boy wizard with the power to make children read 800 pages without stopping. Or we … well, do anything that lifts us beyond survival and self, and into the imagination.

Beyond that line is where hope is born. The power to dream of something better. The desire to make it be.

The madness that can transform all of mundane reality in its wake.

OK, that’s heady stuff from a crazy knight and a guy with a six-foot rabbit. But when you find joy in the middle of an angry world, it can be a little overpowering. Mad? Maybe. It’s the end of a withdrawal from dreams, and that always has powerful consequences.

Though if those consequences involve 50 singing children, you’ve got no one to blame but yourself.

See you on stage.

 

(PS – Want to join the madness? Show times and tickets are at www.longmonttheatre.org. Tell ’em Harvey sent you. )

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Stage Left

There’s a doorknob on my desk from a troupe that ceased to be.

The Doorknob Award usually garners a few questions when people notice it. The simple answer is that it’s a prize given for overcoming technical difficulties, where the set broke down but the actor didn’t. I got it for navigating a grease-covered stage as the moustache-twirling villain in a melodrama, after the audience got a bit too enthusiastic about throwing popcorn.

It’s one of my favorite things that I ever brought home from the Community Theatre of Emporia. And now it has to be a lasting memory.

This week, I found out the CTE is no more.

I’ve never lost a theatre company before. I never really believed one could. Like most disasters, it’s a possibility you can be intellectually aware of without realizing it can happen to you. It seems even less likely when the company has a long run, 34 years in the case of the CTE.

But sometimes, in spite of everything, the show really doesn’t go on.

There were a lot of reasons. There always are. The company had to move out of its base in the Emporia Arts Council about the time I moved out of Kansas, and never really found another permanent home. Toward the end, there was never quite enough money and never quite enough hands on deck, a familiar refrain to many actors and producers. It’s always been easier to get people to see a show than to perform in one, and in this over-busy day and age, even getting them to be an audience takes a lot of work.

Funny. So many times it never felt like work. Not really.

I think many of us have a space like that. The home away from home, the place you come because you want to, not because you have to. And whether it’s a church, or a pub, or a reading group, or a stage – or even an online community – it comes to feel like an extension of your own family, a place where, as the song goes, everybody knows your name.

Losing a place like that can feel like a death. When the bookstore closes or the website goes away or the mall gets bulldozed, it leaves behind questions, confusion and uncertainty about the future. It’s easy to rehash the deed and wonder if anything could have changed it, to get angry or depressed or numb.

For an actor, the poignancy has a jagged edge. After all, we create dreams. We turn sweat and imagination into worlds that never were. To be reminded that the magic has limits, that all our powers of sub-creation still have to bow to the world outside the stage door – it’s humbling. And more than a little frightening.

Like many a mourner, it would be too easy for me to get lost in grief. So instead, I’ll raise my virtual glass to stir the echoes, strengthen the memories, and wake up the ghosts.

Here’s to the CTE.

Here’s to the crew that performed outdoor Shakespeare in 95 degree heat and 95 percent humidity, bringing the same passion whether the audience held 100 people or three.

Here’s to the company that made sets fall apart on command and who improvised fast when they fell apart without one.

Here’s to my role as an actor literally playing God in “J.B.,” complete with a beard that belonged on a Pearl Street busker.

Here’s to blunted swords and guns with blanks, to robber bridegrooms and roaring Roosevelts, to Christmases on the road with “Politically Correct Bedtime Stories.”

And yes, here’s to popcorn-covered stages so slick you could skate on them.

Here’s to you, my friends and family. May our creation rest in peace and live in memory.

And someday, like a stage-door ghost, may it rise and walk again.

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Snownose

In the shady recesses of the Rochat back yard, the last holdouts of snow still linger.

For a little while each day, so does Duchess the Wonder Dog.

For those who haven’t met her yet, Duchess is our eldest dog, an 11-year-old mix of border collie and black lab who’s both too smart for her own good and too shy to be believed. A rescue dog, she latched onto my wife Heather like a furry guardian angel and still gets anxious on the rare occasions that the two of them are apart.

She’s getting a little slower these days, as older dogs do. She rests a little more, takes a little longer to hear her name, trots downstairs a little more slowly when it’s time for a run or a meal. She’s hardly on her last legs yet, but those legs have less hurry and more care than they used to.

Until the winter comes. And then something magical happens.

A sparkling fountain of youth arrives.

When the nights are cold and the ground is white, Duchess is in her glory. She crouches. Buries her nose in the snow. Takes off at top speed for the next drift. Buries her nose again. Then repeats and repeats and repeats, running an Indy 500 course through the yard, looking more like a puppy than a Grand Old Lady with every snowflake.

Like Clark Kent becoming Superman, Duchess has become Snownose the Unstoppable. No fear. Just pure unadulterated joy.

It’s worth watching. Even if it does mean opening the door … and opening the door … and opening the door again in hard-freezing temperatures just to see if she’s finished up her business yet. Not only is it fun to see the young dog I remember, but I even get a little jealous of how thoroughly she can lose herself in her wonder and exuberance.

That is, until I recognize in her joy an echo of my own.

No, I don’t spend Friday nights sticking my nose in random snowdrifts. (Well, not unless the walk is really icy.) But I have noticed that when I start to write, the rest of the world falls away for a while. Even headaches of near-migraine level will get pushed to the back as the cranial supervisor declares “Sorry, no time for that now. We’ve got a fresh shipment of words coming in and we need the space.”

Maybe it’s an extreme focus on the moment. Or the power of routine for someone who’s been putting fingers to keyboards for far too long. But at its core, I think it’s a passion, a liberation, even an embrace.

It’s knowing what you were meant to do. And then doing it.

And it’s a joy I think too many of us never discover.

That’s not a condemnation. Especially these days, many of us just try to make it from moment to moment, doing what we need to do just to keep life going. For someone burdened by the “now,” asking to reach for something more may seem frivolous, even cruel.

It’s not an easy escape. But when it happens, it can give the moments meaning.

And once reached, it’s hard to resist going back.

I know an author, Christopher Paul Curtis, who wrote his first novel on an assembly line. Literally. He’d double up on hanging car doors to give a friend a break, then take a few minutes to write here and there when his buddy did the same for him.

He reached for his joy. Even in the middle of a car factory.

And it changed his world.

Maybe it’s a battle to find even five minutes. Maybe those five minutes won’t produce the next hit song, or the recipe of the year, or the business that lets you lean back and retire.

But if the effort takes you out of yourself – no, takes you more thoroughly into yourself – that’s the real prize. And the more it happens, the more you want it to happen. Even if it means fighting for that five minutes again.

When you get there, it won’t matter.

All that will matter is the chill of the night. And the waiting dance of the snow.

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Something Went “Click”

The living room had been struck by a toddler tornado.

From one end to the other, the floor displayed the unmistakable signs that my 2-year-old niece Riley had been present. Scattered toys. Well-strewn cookie cutters. Discarded magazines. And not a square inch of carpet to be seen.

But as I started to pick thing up, I realized something was missing.

“Oh, please no …” I muttered, knowing how upset Missy would be if this had been lost or broken. A frantic search finally uncovered the safe-keeping spot my wife Heather had used, out of Riley’s sight and reach. Inside lay a massive Study in Multi-Colored Plastic Brick, an agglomeration that might require its own building code.

Fort Missy was safe.

That’s my name for it, anyway. I’m not quite sure what Missy herself considers it. The broken paths and varied levels could be a city, a labyrinth, a mighty chunk of abstract art. Heather swears it’s an attempt at an airport where a relative once worked.

Whatever it is, it’s required almost every Lego our developmentally-disabled young lady possesses, with minor adjustments here and there to integrate new pieces. Every so often, Heather and I get invited to help with specific bits of the masterpiece, a tiny brick pressed into our hands to make the latest revision.

It’s funny. For months, those Legos had sat in the house, little-used. But lately, they’ve become a passion for Missy, right up there with her morning tea and her bedtime story.

Ever since a certain exhibit hit the Longmont Museum.

You know the one I mean. Everybody in town knows the one I mean. The museum’s “Amazing World of LEGO” exhibit has easily been its most visited ever, and small wonder. Some of the exhibits are jaw-dropping: a Lego-built bicycle, a plastic recreation of Action Comics No. 1, and more.

But the heart of it, and by far the noisiest part, has been the Lego city where child visitors constantly build, demolish and build again. Surrounded by possibilities, they create their own.

Apparently, one visitor took those possibilities home.

I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, inspiration is a funny thing. It only takes the lightest of touches from the outside to send the mind in a new direction, or unlock a dream that had laid dormant.

For me, a missing word in a Spanish textbook’s glossary helped lead me to journalism.

For my wife, a chance-heard broadcast on the anniversary of John Lennon’s death ignited a lifelong passion for the Beatles. Followed very rapidly by a fascination (if sometimes a joking one) with Bob Dylan.

I suspect everyone has a similar story. Maybe a word in the right place or an image in the wrong one. A picture, a tune, a story that takes root.

It’s a powerful thing. And an unsettling one.

It means we need to be aware of our own actions. A kind word may reverberate longer than we expect; an offhand wisecrack may wound more deeply than we see.

It means we need to tend the fields of inspiration so that they’re there when needed. A museum or a forest. A drama class or a space program. Anything that fills the void with possibilities and imagination.

Because make no mistake, the void will be filled. And if we don’t choose some of those possibilities, they will be chosen for us. Does anyone really want to leave that life-changing touch to the undie-clad pop stars of the MTV VMA Awards?

I didn’t think so.

We all have the power to be givers of dreams. It’s up to us to use it well.

After all, Fort Missy  won’t get built by itself.

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Gone To Potter – And Thank Goodness

“No story lives unless someone wants to listen.” – J.K. Rowling, 2011.

Don’t look now, but Harry Potter may just save the world.

OK, granted, he’s famous for doing that. I’m intimately familiar with the battles of England’s favorite boy wizard against the forces of Voldemort. I’ve cheered him on as he raised his wand against evil, selfishness and – most frightening of all – government bureaucracy.

But I’m not talking about the fictional confines of Harry’s hidden magical universe. I’m talking right here. Right now.

Or at least, that’s what Anthony Gierzynski is saying.

Gierzynski is the author of “Harry Potter and the Millennials,” a political science book that looks at the children who grew up among tales of Hogwarts and now make up a young voting bloc of their own.

What sort of voters? That’s the interesting part. Based on Gierzynski’s studies, the millennials who grew up reading the Potter books were more likely to be tolerant of differences and less likely to support using deadly force or torture; more likely to be politically active and less likely to be authoritarian.

In short, the sort of people we seem to need so much these days.

“I give Dobby most of the credit!” teased a friend.

Maybe so. Maybe there’s something to be said for an early exposure to Dobby, the fearful house-elf with an unlikely potential for heroism … or to a world where wizards’prejudices have visible consequences … or even to an orphaned boy who belongs to two worlds and sometimes feels out of place in both.

But proceed with caution. And not just because of the giant spiders.

Gierzynski himself warns that correlation may not be causation. For those not used to the difference (a majority, it seems, on the Internet), it works like this: After it rains, I go out and find the roof of my house is wet. But that doesn’t mean soaking my roof will make it rain.

Applied here, it means be careful which way you point the sign post. Sure, it might be that reading Harry Potter creates a tolerant, activist personality. But it could also be that people with tolerant, activist personalities were the most likely to read about him in the first place. Or even that it’s pure coincidence.

Either way, it gives me some hope.

Remember, Harry Potter books in their heyday were the most popular books in the world. At a time where the National Security Agency competes with online marketers to see who can make our lives the most transparent, when ideological differences repeatedly become hard-and-fast battle lines, when rights are treated like conveniences – well, it’s a little encouraging to know that a solid chunk of that record-breaking readership believes in a better way.

More, that they believe in fighting for one.

I know, it’s a long way from imagination to reality. But the way is there. And it’s a road that J.K. Rowling herself has been forcefully pointing to for a long time.

“The Potter books in general are a prolonged argument for tolerance, a prolonged plea for an end to bigotry and I think it’s one of the reasons that some people don’t like the books,” the author once said. “But I think it’s a very healthy message to pass on to younger people that you should question authority and you should not assume that the establishment or the press tells you all of the truth.”

Yes, it’s a story. A fiction. A dream.

But people who have a dream and the passion to see it through, for better or worse, have had an amazing impact on the world before. They will again.

Choose your dreams well.

That’s the magic that lasts.

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A Staggering Achievement

Hop. Hop. Hop.

The single leg pumped hard as Liu Xiang made his way around the track. The crowd cheered, not a medal, but an effort.

Hop. Hop. Hop.

Everyone had seen the fall. The pain. A dream dashed for the second time in four years, again on the first hurdle. Winning was no longer the goal. Simply finishing was.

Hop. Hop. Hop.

When he finished, a competitor raised Liu’s arm into the air. Two others helped him into a wheelchair. He had nothing to say. There were no words to give.

There often aren’t, on the dark side of the Olympic dream.

We celebrate the Olympics as a time of triumph and inspiration. Rightfully so. These are the best in the world, fantastically dedicated men and women who have given years of their lives for a chance at glory on the world’s biggest stage. Even those who miss a medal can still walk off with their head held high at their achievement.

But sometimes, you get a big break – and it gets broken.

Liu at least had climbed the mountain before. In 2004, he’d not only been the gold medal hurdler, he’d been the fastest ever. At only 21, a big future was ahead.

Now, at 29, people are asking if it’s behind. Two Olympics. Two torn Achilles tendons.

Too much.

Disaster in the Olympics is so public. As I watched the hopping hurdler, my own mind went to Dan Jansen. A world-class speed skater, he learned of his sister’s death from leukemia just hours before his start in the ’88 Calgary Games. Shaken (and who wouldn’t be?), he fell twice in two races.

A broken heart. A broken dream.

Jansen was lucky. He got a second act, got to reach triumph at last in Lillehammer in ’94. But not everyone does.

When the London Games started and teenagers claimed some of the early medals, I heard the same question from a lot of friends: “What do you do next? Where do you go when you’ve already reached the top so young?”

A legitimate question. But there’s a parallel one. Where do you go when the dream may be over? Maybe sooner than you thought?

Where can you go?

Most of us have never been on that scale. But we’ve been in that place. Hopes dashed. Plans destroyed. Opportunities shattered.

It’s a dark place. A hard one to leave.

Where can you go? Nowhere but on. That’s true of the brightest success and the most painful collapse. Time doesn’t stop like the end of a film. The story goes on and we have to go on with it as best we can.

If that means hopping, hop like hell.

And when you’ve met the moment with all the pride and stubbornness inside you, be ready. Other moments are waiting. They may be second chances. They may be different chances, ones you could never anticipate.

But they won’t just happen. They need to be claimed.

Eight years ago, in a Kansas column, I wrote about a high school classmate who knew that well. As a girl, she wanted to be Mary Lou Retton. As a teenager, a knee injury ended her gymnastics dreams early. And as a young woman, she channeled her will and ability into diving, going on despite four shoulder surgeries.

Now, Kimiko Soldati is a proud mom. A proud collegiate diving coach. And, oh yes, a proud national champion and Olympian, who qualified for the 2004 Games in Athens.

“I used the obstacles as stepping stones and fuel to my fire,” she told writer Darrell Hamlett then.

She grabbed the chance. Whatever it might be.

I hope Liu can do the same. And all the others like him.

After all, sometimes it’s only a short distance from “hop” to “hope.”