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I distinctly remember lying somewhere in the end zone, incapable of taking a breath. If you've ever had the wind knocked out, I mean completely knocked out, you'll agree that for an instant you believe you may die, and feeling that it might be alright if you did. At five-feet-eight and a hundred and forty pounds, I was not cut out for naked bootlegs around the end against Bay City Central, or for that matter, against the Sisters Of The Poor. Playing quarterback as a smallish guy at a fairly large tradition-rich high school I was routinely in harm's way. Truthfully I loved every minute of it. Okay, scratch "every."
During that game, supine on the grass for what seemed a long time, a familiar voice pierced the haze. "Get up, you're not hurt," growled the coach who doubled as my father, speaking in his adjutant voice. Whenever something scared my dad (which in itself was rare), he'd yell. I wanted to snarl back, "to hell I'm not!" but of course oxygen is required for the speech process. Lying there looking up at indifferent players from our team and theirs' in various poses of boredom, I got up and made my way to the sideline. An assistant coach patted me on the shoulder and said, "That's the way to be tough." It occurred to me later that my getting up had nothing to do with being tough; instead it was simply a way to avoid embarrassment in my formerly reduced state.
All these years later, I still pose the question: What is tough? Was it the English Long Bowmen at Agincourt, Rosa Parks refusing to surrender her bus seat, Lance Armstrong overcoming cancer only to endure relentless torture in another Tour De France? Is it a manager bucking a trend to validate a strong belief, or a single mother living in poverty fighting the odds to be sure her child doesn't slip through the cracks of academia? What is tough? Well, it's all of the above and a hell of lot more.
Asked this question a Green Beret once replied, "You can't tell what a warrior looks like." The meaning was obvious. Heroes and leaders do not come from physique, dash, ego, or bloodline. They come from the heart. And on a given day the most unlikely person defying all of the stereotypes of heroism, looking and acting like anything but a master-of-the-universe can become tough enough to meet a desperate crisis head-on.
Perhaps the best definition of toughness comes with the observation that a person becomes truly tough when they continue to fight for what is required to overcome an obstacle, long after the discovery of many reasons not to. In fact, the manifestation of your potential for toughness has little to do with exactly how it plays out at the moment-of-truth but instead, that you can muster the inner-strength to achieve it when others may not. Then again, maybe it's the question once asked in a Starbucks commercial; What if we cared all of the time, the way we care some of the time?
So when you're down on yourself for not being tough enough, for not fitting the picture of what it means to be tough seen through the prism of books or movies, cut yourself some slack. The most robust physical specimens can crack under pressure, the greatest scholars fail to score one hundred, and the best athletes do miss the winning shot.
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