One of my favorite movies is Meet the Robinsons. I love it for a lot of reasons, but one of the characters keeps repeating throughout the escapades of the short film, “Keep moving forward!” At the end of the movie, the credits reveal it is part of a Walt Disney quote, but the coopted context encourages the audience to push through failure to find a later success. The sentiment can be presented in an unfortunately cliched way, but I really do think it’s a valuable lesson to keep moving forward despite various setbacks.
Reflecting back on the past decade, I clearly took the lesson to heart that the decade old movie taught. The movie coincidentally was released the same year I graduated high school. Exactly ten years ago this past week I walked across a stage to receive my high school diploma. I’ve had quite a few setbacks since then, and like the protagonist of Meet the Robinsons, I’ve learned to keep moving forward in the face of failure.
The most obvious of all the struggles is the ongoing physical recovery. Ten years ago, I walked across a stage with ease and teared up with hope for the future I dreamed of – returning to Faith Bible High School to teach English. Three days ago, I spent an hour chatting with my German physiotherapist as she massaged and stretched my nerve damaged legs before helping me onto an elliptical where I tired myself out in less than five minutes. Four days ago, the exact anniversary of my sappy graduation ceremony, I laughed with several students about the silly things I said and did in high school. I never could have dreamed of those things as I was transitioning from high school to college.
Media often tells us that high school youth is the ideal time to be alive. I’ve found so far that with a little effort and attitude life just keeps getting better. I used to want to go back to teach at FBHS, but I can see now that for me that would be going backwards. I need to keep moving forward. This week’s forward moments were walking around the fire station without my braces and finishing my semester homework grading. Next week I look forward to celebrating my students – the first class of BFA freshman that I taught – finishing well and transitioning to new and exciting things all across the globe. Fortunately, I’ll finally be Facebook friends with a few, so I can follow along through their next decade of change and growth as they keep moving forward too.
