I've once again gotten behind on my blog posts (sad face). I'm trying my best, but sometimes I really have difficulty finding inspiration, and I'm pretty sure if I just wrote about my daily existence no one would read for real, because really, I don't do that many interesting things every single day. Although I have actually found a One Direction song that I quite enjoy and that's pretty strange and interesting for me to even admit.
So here's the actual point of this post. I started this out with a quote from a man named Charlie Plumb. I didn't know who Charlie Plumb was until I was required to watch one of his speeches for my online speech class. It was late, around 11:06pm when I started watching. Much to my dismay, the speech was 55 minutes long. Ugh. I just wanted to go to sleep. And by go to sleep I mean lay in bed and get on Pinterest until I couldn't keep my eyes open one more second. But once again I was having difficulties with the internet, so I was forced to watch this speech on one of the pretty desktop Macs in the FOCUS Center (it's a tutoring center for the freshies, but I tend to get in there and do homework when my room is too messy to encourage adequate concentration efforts). I plugged in some headphones, and settled in for the long haul.
An old man appeared on the screen, He introduced himself as Mr. Charlie Plumb, and he had been a top gun pilot and prisoner of war during Vietnam. Suddenly, I was intrigued. I listened to him speak with that old-timey tone and those vintage catchphrases. It sort of reminded me of listening to my Great-Grandpa Bowen preach in church, except for Mr. Plumb had studied professional speaking and Grandpa Bowen has not. On to the point, though. Mr. Charlie Plumb was a prisoner of war for 6 years, and he was expected to basically be a basket case when he finally returned to the States. But, much to everyone's surprise, he was not in fact crazy - even when he found out that his wife had hung on for 5 years, waiting for him, but had filed for divorce 3 months before his return. He was still okay. In fact, he was inspired. He was encouraged. He was strong. Why? How could something so terrible happen to one man, yet he rises above the negativity in order to inspire others? What's the answer?
The answer is that Mr. Plumb used this negative experience to "pack his parachute." This is the analogy he uses throughout his presentation. The whole point of the analogy is that sometimes negative, horrible, terrible, heart-breaking things happen in life. But, all of the past experiences you've had, all of the people who have taught you something valuable throughout life have packed your parachute to ensure your survival of these difficult things. All of the joys and pains, losses and gains, and difficult lessons to learn that you've experienced are the things that you can look back on and use when something even harder comes up. And then that becomes an experience in itself. So if you go back to the top of this page, and read the quote I began with, you'll see my point. You absolutely have to believe that you can find something good in the bad.
Anyways, I'm not a motivational speaker. Maybe with some further cultivation and one solid idea (this is hard for me. I have lots and lots of kind of almost solid ideas. I just need to pick one...) I could be a professional speaker. But I'm pretty sure that's not my calling. Charlie Plumb gives his speech a lot better than I can sum it up, so if you've got some time and if you're feeling like everything's going wrong, watch this old man tell you what's what here. Then after you watch, think about the experiences, people and places that have helped to pack your parachute, and thank God, thank those people, for those lessons. Even the hard ones.
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