Mr. Carey spoke on Meeting Your Challenges – Over HD hookup from Austin Texas.
He provides an analogy in the form of a story. On rare occasions something happens to us that creates monumental impact in our lives. What happened to him was during the Vietnam war in 1967. While flying he ejected from the plane, tried to radio for help no help came. He was immediately surrounded by Vietnamese people. He spent 5 and a half years in prison there. How did he do it? How did he make it through? They (the prisoners) started by creating a communication process. By knocking on the wall with “shave and a haircut, two bits” to locate other American soldiers. They then knocked on the wall with numbers to correspond to the alphabet. Then built a alphabet matrix from that.
They were cut off, isolated. They were disconnected. It is the same for us. Sometimes we feel out of touch and isolated in our work environments. How did they overcome that feeling? They moved on from initial communication to creating the “entertainment” committee. They had 100% attendance at their cell meetings. They set up a schedule for story telling. He told the story of Dr. Zhivago.
They decided to grow through that experience. They did what they had to do. They kept the faith. They taught each other, shared their experiences. He learned to play the piano and performed for his cell mates. The inmates used Pig Latin for a while to communicate and then moved on to French. They did what they had to do.
They memorized everything! Everything you have ever been exposed to is carried in your brain. You have to go dig it out. Under interrogation, they tried to get information from him. Interrogations, led to beatings which led to torture. He got to the point that he couldn’t think, couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything. He started thinking about the 23 Psalm. He could remember the first line of the 23 Psalm. He eventually dredged up the entire thing.
You would be totally amazed at what you could remember if you were in an isolated place and only had time to think. Laughter was used a great deal during his imprisonment. Laughter is good medicine. They had faith in themselves to do the best that they could do. Faith and trust in each other was crucial to their survival. He placed is faith in God. No matter what happens in our lives we choose how we are going to deal with it. So how do you choose to deal with your problems? It’s all a matter of choice! We have the ability to deal with those choices.
When you listen to this presentation one can only think that there can be no greater obstacle or challenge than being tortured and imprisoned. It puts our own challenges in perspective. We CAN really deal with the challenges we have. We need to use our own imagination and ingenuity to deal with it and construct solutions. We are responsible for coping with the challenges in our life.
This is the best of all times and possibly the worst of all times. Being who you are, doing what you do, living where you are living… it’s entirely up to us to which it is … the best of times or the worst of times.
We finally got around to recording our first real podcast… on the drive home. What can I say? We were so in to the conference that we forgot to do many recordings :). You can see the most recent podcast in our Gcast widget on the right side of the page [EDIT: embedded below]. You can also see a list of past recordings by clicking on the “Posts” button. Here is the description of the most recent recording: