We have been seeing various faces who represent the Olympic spirit. As I have been watching the Olympics when I can in the evening, I see who is dominating the marketing dollar. Simone Biles is at the top of the list. Her event is demanding and flamboyant. Katie Ledecky won the 1500 race, the longest race in men’s and women’s swimming with perseverance. It was her twelfth gold medal, the most any female swimmer has ever won. She too will become the face of the Olympics.
When I am experiencing anything, I always ask myself what we can learn from that experience. More to the point what I want a student to know to help him or her move through the challenges of life. I would tell my ethics class that frequently. Learn from everything that is happening to you that will make you a better person. Recently, a former student who is going through a challenging time said to me, “what doesn’t kill me will make me stronger” words taken from the philosophy of Nietzsche who is a controversial figure in ethics and philosophy.
What makes Ledecky’s accomplishment so important is that it is about endurance and boring until you cheer during and at the conclusion. It calls forth a different form of intensity. It reminds me of an anesthesiologist friend of mine who commented that his work is 99 percent boring, and 1 percent scared out of your mind at times.
No one has gone up to our Olympians and asks, “What are you thinking about during your event?” However, one our gymnast said that he thinks through every one of his moves before getting on his designated challenge.
I recently wrote about motivation and stated that glee must be one of the aspects of motivation as well as doing something for others.
When Ledecky won her event, she was the very definition of joy and glee. She said, “I don’t mean to celebrate that much but it just comes out.”
But I was struck by something else that she said when she was asked what she thinks about during her race. She is not on autopilot. She thinks about her family, friends, and teammates. Those thoughts empower her during the race. I wish they would ask that question of all the Olympians as young people would benefit from hearing the variety of answers.
I was struck by Ledecky’s answer because it is something I taught my students in an ethics class. When we think of Holocaust Literature, many think of The Diary of Anne Frank. The second most read book about the Holocaust is not as well known. It is Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning. Frankl was a concentration camp survivor who wanted to know why some people were able to survive the Holocaust, so he asked many survivors how they did it for he knew how he did it and was interested in seeing if that resonated with others, and for many it did. He went to the heart of perseverance which is at the heart of motivation as well. Joy came in the form of watching the allied troops free the Jewish people from their camp. It was a joy that defies words. But there was more that was also what the survivors thought about were thinking during their concentration camp days. There were two things. One was that they had a clear sense of their identity and what had shaped their lives, pre-Hitler. Second, they thought about and derived a sense of love and support from thoughts about friends and family.
Most of you know that I love the sport of boxing. There was a 2005 movie, Cinderella Man, which depicted the life of James J. Braddock starring Russell Crow. He works as a day laborer whose manager, Paul Giamatti, offers him a one- time slot against a young contender. Braddock wins and goes back to fulltime boxing during the Depression. He sets his sights on the defending world champion. It is hard times. He wants to literally feed his family. The fight scenes are brutal, but during each punishment that he is receiving in the ring, the director inserts a scene of him thinking about his wife and kids as flashbacks. That’s an example of what Frankl and Ledecky did. Think about Ledecky and the long practices to achieve her goal.
Frankl went on to invent a form of therapy, logotherapy using these principles. I have used them in my counseling of others.
Jennifer Lozano nicknamed the “troublemaker” for trouble she causes in the ring is the only Olympian to come from the poor town of Laredo, Texas. She was bullied as a child and walked into a boxing gym at 9 to learn how to defend herself from bullies in her school. Her journey to the Olympics involved her fighting boys and people more privileged than she. She commented in the interview that “her mother saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself.” Her mother and father were divorced which made her rise even more difficult.
Her mother said that she could sense the joy that her daughter had for the sport. When she completed the competition to go to the Olympics and her arms were raised, she and her mother fell into each other’s arms and cried. Jennifer moves forward by never forgetting what her mother did to have a poor kid from Laredo live her dream to make the Olympics.
I always taught my students that “life is to be enjoyed or learned from.” What can we all learn from the Olympics which is a mix of joy and learning?
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