“It is in our darkest moment that we must focus to see the light.” – Aristotle Onassis
Every man has a season where the only thing he can see is what he is losing. That is not weakness and it is not a lack of faith. It is what being in the darkness does to a man’s eyes.
I have been in that season this year. It ended this week.
Here is the thing about the dark. There is always something good in it, and you get to choose which part of it you look at. When I submit to the darkness, I am a victim. When I focus on gratitude and on what I still have, and on the good coming that I cannot see yet, I am a man moving through the tunnel. That choice is not one decision and done, but one made almost every morning for years. The mornings I chose wrong, I knew it by noon.
When it all came to the end last week, I could have focused on the financial loss. Here is what I chose to focus on instead: I have full custody of my children.
Less than one in ten men who go through what I went through end up there. I paid for it. If a man’s job is to build and to protect, then I can stand at the end of the hardest year of my adult life and know I did the job. I protected my children. I protected their innocence. I protected what they are going to inherit from me.
And I know I protected their innocence, because I have proof, and the proof came in the middle of the worst of it. I was sitting in a legal negotiation that ran seven and a half hours. Somewhere in the middle of it, both of my kids texted me about something that had nothing to do with anything, some small thing that mattered to them that day.
My first reaction was frustration. I am in here fighting for my life and you are asking me about this?
I told someone I trusted about it afterward and they stopped me and said No, that is an example of your leadership. If you had been showing them how awful this was, how hard, how frightening, they would be worried about you right now. They would be reaching out to comfort you. They are children, and they do not feel any need to do that, because you carried the weight without setting it down on top of them.
I sat with that for a while.
Men, hear the whole thing. I did not get to that moment because I am a good man who did the right thing for twenty years. I got there because I lived the other way first, for a long time, in a thousand small increments that nobody could see, including me. The version of me who was handed that custody agreement is a different man than the one who started this. He got built one small decision at a time, in exactly the same way the other one got built.
That is the part I want you to take. The man who comes apart and the man who holds are not made by their big moments. They are both made by the small ones, going one direction or the other, for years, while nobody is watching and nothing appears to be happening.
This week’s lesson: You are only going to be the man you want to be by building it one decision at a time.
