David McElroy

Arthur was a 47-year-old disabled veteran. For 15 years, doctors told him he would never walk without braces or some kind of assistance. He accepted this as fact.

He says he had basically given up. He had been injured in the first Gulf War and too many jumps out of airplanes as a paratrooper had taken a toll on his back and knees. He gained a lot of weight. He couldn’t run or walk without braces. He even used a wheelchair at times.

Then Arthur found a yoga instructor who was touched by his situation and wanted to help him. With his help, Arthur’s transformation was amazing. Please watch the short video below and listen to what happened — and how from “no way” a way was found to transform his life.

I’ve written before about the need to keep trying to achieve things when they’re really what we want. There are many times that we’re close to achieving our goals when we walk away. (Re-read a story I told a few months back about people who quit “three feet from gold.”)

Arthur radically transformed himself. Most of us would have given up completely instead. I need to be constantly reminded of Arthur’s lesson. Maybe you do, too. It might be a sappy and emotionally told lesson, but it’s real.

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The new wireless technology these days means that many birds have some adjustments to make.

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Whenever a person kills himself, the instant question that everyone seems to ask is, “Why did he do it?” I’m starting to suspect this is the wrong question.

When retired NFL star Junior Seau killed himself this week, the speculation immediately turned to the question of whether he might have been suffering from some kind of brain damage brought on by many years in a sport filled with violent collisions. Did that long-term trauma lead to his suicide?

I’m not an expert on brain injuries, but I don’t doubt that athletes in high-contact sports suffer injuries that affect them as they age. I wonder, though, if there’s a more basic reason why a retired athlete — who’s spent his life as a hero to many — takes his own life.

What if he simply can’t find any reason to keep on living?

I can’t find the reference now, but I remember reading something in a psychology book that made this argument. It said that we all have something like a built-in “self-destruct switch.” The switch constantly flips itself automatically to “self-destruct mode.” If we have a reason to keep living, we keep flipping it off. But if we quit finding a reason to do that, we passively leave the switch set to that mode — and then we destroy ourselves in one way or another.

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