Success is what you’ve learned

Perhaps this will fall on deaf ears if you are young and healthy.

I’ve had a great run. Literally and figuratively. I am blessed. I have done pretty much everything I’ve wanted to do and have set my heart to doing. Not that I did it all well, but nevertheless, if I wanted to try something, I did.

I got a chance to sit and really visit with my grandfather while I was in college and told him that I was weighing some choices. I wanted to do something that I was kind of scared of doing. He quietly listened to the dream I laid out and then answered me.

“I’m going to a place called Sawbill next month,” he said.

It wasn’t an answer to my question, or at least… I didn’t think it was.

I learned that at 65 years of age, an avid hunter and fisherman who had already been inducted into the National Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame was about to embark on a life-changing journey.

He had been honored for his service in WWII, he traveled the world, he loved only one woman and was married to her for over 50 years. I was under the impression that he’d done everything and anything that he set his heart to do.

But he had always wanted to go on moose hunt and there at his age, with a pacemaker in his chest he had weighed his decision and he set his compass to his true north for this one thing that had always eluded him. Perhaps he knew his time was short.

Now, I can’t even remember what decision troubled me so much way back then, but it paled in comparison to what he was about to do. He took his best hunting buddy (also in his 60s), they packed up my grandfather’s station wagon and headed for a point in on the border of Manitoba and Saskatchewan where a plane had to fly them in from Flin Flon to a remote island in Reindeer Lake where they were to meet a guide and hunt for moose.

In fact, I stopped thinking about my decisions and began thinking about his. I mean, I wasn’t worried. He was old school. He knew how to live off the land. His family lost their Iowa farm to the dust bowl and they started over in Rhinelander, Wisconsin. I always felt safe with my grandfather out in the woods as a child. I was convinced he could do anything from welding to fishing to hunting to remodeling and I could go on and on. I just knew he would live forever.

It was a successful trip. He got his moose no thanks to a worthless guide and complaining friend, and not only shot it, but drug it, cleaned it, cut it, packaged it, loaded the planes and after a final afternoon of fishing – they got in the station wagon and headed home – back the 1200 miles to Milwaukee.

When he got back I was in my second year of college and he and grandma made a trip up to Eau Claire to visit me there. One of my first questions was if he had any doubts about going on such a trip that evidently tired the man.

“Oh sure,” he said. “I considered it for years. But let me tell you something right now. When you get to the end of your journey and you lay your head down one final time here on this earth, your satisfaction will come in the things you did rather than regrets about the things you didn’t do. You remember you can do anything you want to do if you can remove the fear of failing. The fear of regret has got to be greater than the fear of failure. It’s what you’ve learned and the wonders that you see that will carry you through that final door.”

That was September of 1975. Three months later he was gone and I was wrong – he didn’t live forever. But in my heart – he will.

So, I have always carried that with me. Whether I was teaching, coaching and playing basketball; writing stories or sermons; taking photos for National Geographic or entering into a venture that left me homeless. Oh, the things I have learned. Oh, the wonders I have seen.

And last week when I sat in a doctor’s office and waited for a test to come back, the word “cancer” never scared me. If it stays or if it goes. If I stay or if I go. I have been able to say that I have been given a wonderful life. And it doesn’t change what I will choose to do tomorrow. It will be exactly what I’ve been taught to do all my life – to live. I know who I am. I know whose I am.

And someday I will go to sleep one last time without regrets; knowing that a fear of failure never stopped me from experiencing everything this life has put on my plate. And oh, how full I’ve become… at times, even going back for seconds.

“Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat and to drink and to be merry.” – Ecclesiastes 8:15