There is a Kids in the Hall comedy sketch where this man picks a fight with another man who is much much stronger than he is. This man gets pummeled punch after punch after punch, but he just keeps getting up and challenging the stronger man. A crowd watches on, growing in number as the fight progresses.
Each time the man is knocked out they cry, “STAY DOWN!” The man refuses to stay down. The stronger man intensifies his response.
He goes from his usual knockout punch to throwing the man into a dumpster to throwing the man over a building and, finally, the stronger man walks away. The beat up man eventually comes back to pick another fight with the stronger man and the stronger man walks away again. This sketch was inspired by Cool Hand Luke, one of the greatest movies of all time, where Paul Newman’s character carries out this same theme of tenacity, albeit in a more complex and incredibly brilliant manner.
Sometimes in life, you don’t go up to someone bigger than you and start something, but you pick a fight with your very existence. People are struggling with something within themselves and something about you just pushes all the wrong buttons inside of them. There is no winning. Everything is rigged against you so that nothing you do can ever have any sense of rightness to it or any sense of favor in someone’s heart. You are always wrong. Failure is your only future.
I think one of the answers is to just be the idiot that won’t stay down. Giving up is not an option, winning someone over is not an option, and compromising is not an option. You have your standards of right and wrong, your standard of who you want to be as an individual, your beliefs about God and justice, and that is about it. So you act on that, knowing that outcomes don’t give a crap about how you act but you do give a crap about how you act.
Hopefully, one day the people who are continuing to swing the punches at you will walk away from teaching you a lesson that was never their business to teach in the first place. You don’t have to stay down. You don’t have to give up.
You can keep getting up. You can keep being like Cool Hand Luke and always seek to challenge things that are wrong and absurd. Maybe it will catch up with you like it did with Luke and you will “lose” in the end. But at least Luke got to go with a smile on his face, knowing he lived in a manner he aspired to live.
You can stand me up at the gates of hell, but I won’t back down.- Tom Petty
Luke did not settle and he refused to be conformed to a set of twisted moral standards. When life keeps knocking you out, moment after moment after achingly long moment, maybe there is hope that one day your bully will lose interest in you and walk away. Even if the best hope is that you “lose” with a smile on your face, you will still win in the ways that count.
Hope is so resilient that even when there is none to be found, it persists towards you anyway. Somehow things will be okay. You’ve got this!
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This post is republished on Medium.
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