Though Zupan’s story is a thoroughly modern one, we can’t help but detect the grandeur of a hero’s arc, seeing the athlete struck by the “gods” but ready to bravely battle his demons to emerge triumphantly. The trick is, however, that this athlete’s success did not take the form he expected it to. That fateful night, it would seem that all the young man’s dreams were robbed from him—but he simply went on to create different dreams!
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Transcripts
Narrator:
Marc Zupan and overcoming by doing
Though Viktor Frankl has passed away, he surely would have approved of Marc Zupan, whose autobiography title tells you everything you need to know about him: GIMP : When Life Deals You a Crappy Hand, You Can Fold—or You Can Play. Zupan, too, showed how your true character shines through not when everything is going right for you, but when trouble hits and you’re forced to make the best of it. Zupan is certainly not the only sportsman to make lemonade out of the lemons life gave him, but he is one of the more well known.
One night in:
For an athlete and sportsman like Zupan, this could only have felt like a death sentence. Used to enjoying and using his bodily strength to the fullest, he was now weakened and unable to play the sport he loved. Or was he?
d rugby player of the year in:
Beyond that, Zupan has made a name for himself as a media personality that many people look up to. He’s given interviews and appeared on shows and TV series, as well as in guest roles in all kinds of productions, including the Murderball movie. He’s visited the White House, and done other impressive feats like rock climbing and skydiving.
Though he must have felt utter despair hanging from a tree that night, Zupan no longer looks at the accident as a tragedy. When asked in an interview whether he wished it never happened, he replied, "No, I don't think so. My injury has led me to opportunities and experiences and friendships I would never have had before. And it has taught me about myself. In some ways, it's the best thing that ever happened to me."
Zupan’s no-nonsense attitude and refusal to let a moment of adversity determine his entire life make him an endearing character. There’s a lot we can learn from him—hopefully without having to go through the same sort of ordeal! Like the Buddhist farmer in our earlier chapter, we see that Zupan had the wisdom to look at the seemingly disastrous events in his life without pre-judgment. He might certainly have felt wretched at some points, but ultimately, he decided not to go with the story, My life is ruined, I can’t do anything now, I’m a victim of a stupid and senseless accident…
Though Zupan’s story is a thoroughly modern one, we can’t help but detect the grandeur of a hero’s arc, seeing the athlete struck by the “gods” but ready to bravely battle his demons to emerge triumphant. The trick is, however, that this athlete’s success did not take the form he expected it to. That fateful night, it would seem that all the young man’s dreams were robbed from him—but he simply went on to create different dreams!
It’s truly a marvelous thing when someone achieves their grandest visions for their life, not despite their challenges, but even because of them. Zupan took the hand he’d been dealt and ran with it. Sure, he could never play the sport as he knew it again. But so what? In a Herculean (a significant word choice, considering our previous discussion) act of bravery, creativity, and determination, he did what he could—and he did it extremely well. Zupan’s story teaches us that it doesn’t really matter what the details and circumstances of your life are. What matters is your attitude, your values, your goals and how hard you’re willing to work to achieve them.
If Zupan felt despair at having the door forever closed on a certain version of his life, he never allowed it to stop him, or interfere with him asking what new shape his life would take. An excellent antidote to adversity is not to hunker down and endure it, but to reframe it entirely, even to the extent that it no longer resembles adversity at all. With a little flexibility of spirit, imagination, and the guts to “accept what you can’t change and change what you can’t accept,” Zupan hit it out the park.
Many of us cling to a story of ourselves as a victim. We get bogged down by the question of whether something is “fair” or not, or we get lost in blame and anger at others. We never even realize how much of this narrative is purely optional! While it may be true that people are sometimes struck by accident, or treated unfairly, or lose out for no good reason, it’s also true that these things are not strictly the end of the world—and Zupan proves it.
The startling difference in his attitude is one of agency—he looks at what he wants, and what he can do to get it. Simple. “One door closes and another opens,” as they say, and dwelling on the door that’s closed could cause you to not notice all the other doors that are now open to you. The essence of this story is to be found all over: the businessman whose “failed” invention turns out to have an alternate use and becomes a raging success. The woman who feels like her cancer scare has given her a new lease on life. Any number of people who look back on past crises and wistfully think that, in hindsight, it was precisely what needed to happen to them at that moment.
How can we inject a little of Marc Zupan’s pluck and fearlessness into our own lives? We don’t have to wait until some disaster befalls us. Much like Viktor Frankl suggests, it’s all a question of attitude. The next time things don’t go your way, pause for a moment and resist jumping in to frame the experience as a Bad Thing. Instead of looking at how things were, turn your attention to the present and the future: what else is possible now? Yes, you’ve lost your job, but doesn’t that also mean you’re now free to get a better one? Falling seriously ill can shake your faith and make you see the worst in others, but it can also be a golden opportunity to do something really special with the time you have left—what could that be?
It’s a given that life will seldom go according to plan. If we want to be the kind of people who look back and call their suffering a “blessing in disguise,” we have to be willing to let go of certain fixed ideas or assumptions about ourselves, our lives, what we want, what we’re capable of. When life is progressing as expected, we pull back from taking chances out of fear, believing we can’t do certain things.
Isn’t it wonderful then, when life steps in, takes the choice away from you and puts you in precisely the situation that will prove to you that you’re very much stronger than you thought you were? We have to have the openness, the bravery and flexibility to rechristen tragedies as opportunities, or failures as valuable lessons. Knowing that pain and disaster will happen in some measure in everyone’s life, what’s the best attitude we can take when it rears its head?
Before life forces your hand and sends you, willing or not, into a “dark night of the soul,” do some soul-searching yourself. Look very closely at the stories you tell yourself. Marc Zupan might have told himself, “I’m an athlete and sportsman. My life has no meaning without that, without my body,” and that story would certainly have been damaging to him after his accident. But he instead told himself the story, “I’m Marc and I don’t give up, I find a way, no matter what, and I have a damn good time doing it,” and his experience was completely different! It’s not the adversity that changes, but the response to it. In this way, we can all transform adversity, disaster, failure, humiliation and loss into the best lessons of our lives.
It’s this attitude that allows us to see the hidden value in suffering, and the immense power we all possess to define our own experience. If your small business fails and you lose your life’s savings, you could yell at the sky, blame everyone else, become bitter and never take another chance again. Or, you could experience something wonderful: that even when you’re flat broke you’re still alive, still you, and can still make more plans, can still have hope, can still do good in the world. Brilliant! People sometimes say that they’re glad for challenge in life because, if nothing else, it allows them to prove to themselves that they can survive, that they’re made of tough stuff, and that it’s not really the end of the world to lose, to hurt, to make a mistake.
Perhaps we can take most inspiration simply from Zupan’s sense of humor. He uses words for himself (like “crip” or “gimp”) that could have easily hurt and offended him, but he decided instead to laugh at himself first. In doing so, he took away the power—for him or anybody else—to mock him or put him down. This attitude may seem flippant but really shows a deep confidence. Rather than shrinking from his flaws, limitations or disabilities, he looked at them directly, shrugged and thought, So what?
We could all stand to drop a fragile ego if it stands in the way of us simply living. The next time you fail, try it: quickly and completely own your mistake, laugh at yourself and move on. So what if you’ve been a complete idiot? Isn’t it so much more freeing to acknowledge and own a mistake than letting it define you?
