The Strength of the Human Spirit

My life has been filled with setbacks and challenges. I discuss how these struggles taught me the strength of the Human Spirit.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched - they must be felt with the heart.

Helen Keller

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When each of us is born it’s almost like God plans a direction for our lives to follow: some of us find wild levels of professional and personal success; others have deeply personal and powerful relationships; and many of us have incredibly unique paths to walk where we do much of the heavy lifting to uplift one aspect of the entire human race. Throughout my life I have faced setbacks while working to live my dreams. I believe that the life God created each of us to live comes with challenges and difficulty, and overcoming these challenges gives us meaning and personal satisfaction.

In college, I met a girl who I loved in a way that each person can only love one time, like a single use punch card, but without the limitations explained until after the card has been punched. The resulting heart break was so painful that my heart wouldn’t open as wide or as colorful ever again. The experience of my first heart break taught me the depths and weight of the human heart. I suffered countless losses in the years since then. Each time, I didn’t think I would be able to continue. But the past year taught me that the human spirit is unbreakable.

A Story of the Human Spirit

I love all things wilderness and the Natural World, from my time hunting and fishing in the Rocky Mountains of Dulce, New Mexico, a few miles south of Colorado. My dog, a pit-bull and blue-heeler mix that I got as a puppy over 12 years ago when I was mending my broken heart in college has been my best friend and constant companion for all this time during my adventures and travelled with me to Denver and to Bullhead City.

The best engineers and designers take their inspiration from Nature. For example, a spider’s web is stronger than steel of the same thickness. When I started in Bullhead City as a Surveyor Tech, we were finishing the final touches for a leach pad that the drainage system resembled a 20-acre sized leaf in design and when looking from above.

The strength of the Human Spirit is unmatched by any other material. The Human Spirit can be crushed, stomped on, and ground into dust so fine that you can’t even feel it on your fingertips and still survive. The Human Spirit shapes and forms itself around the life and dreams of each person like a gentle flower that blooms in the summer, wilts at the first cold frost of winter, but endures year after year. The Human Spirit is both fragile and durable, capable of surviving in the dampest, coldest, hardest corners on Earth.

The Human Spirit contains every experience of our lives woven into a tapestry that can only be seen when its completed, taking each experience as a new thread to paint a picture. The Human Spirit weaves of thousands of tiny strands into a thick blanket to warm and protect us during the darkest winters.

Every smell, every breath, every experience joins together to create a spiritual soup with a distinct flavor to nourish our bones when we feel lost on the journey of life. The Human Spirit can withstand heart ache, heart break, and disappointment and still look upwards with the fresh and hopeful eyes of a child.

The Strength of the Human Spirit

The way that I remain positive after a setback is to focus on the goals I still want to achieve in my life, and think about how achieving these goals will effect the people around me. When I was younger, before I understood the unbounded strength and durability of the Human Spirit, I was scared to fail and scared of the world, too afraid to spend my one chance at success. Over the years, the heart breaks, and the set backs I learned how to lean into the Strength of the Human Spirit.