Ripple Effect: The Wall

My middle daughter ran a full marathon, an experience that could fill 10 blogs.

It was exciting, amazing, stressful, brilliant, and an all-around exhilarating experience.

My favorite take-away is one particular moment that holds in it so much beauty, making it truly profound.

Toward the end of the marathon my sweet, fierce girl hit a wall and felt she could not go on.

A dad of one of her friends who was cheering her on saw her face and immediately knew. He jumped in and started to run with her. She told him that she wanted to stop and that she wanted to sit down. He told her absolutely not. He said it’s not an option. He simply said, “Come on girl. Run with me.” And run she did and crossed the finish line.

As I said, it was an absolutely extraordinary experience.

She will say that her friend’s dad saved her life.
I told this lovely, marvelous man who I love to no end, how grateful we are. He shrugged and laughed, “It’s really no big deal.” He is such a stellar human being.

They say when you run a marathon you always hit a wall when you feel like you can’t go on.

We all hit walls in our life, walls that seem too hard to climb, walls that seem unbreakable, walls that make us want to sit down and never move again.

But do we have someone to take our hand and help us power through them? Do we have enough humility to take the hand when it is being offered to us? Or can we be the person who gives the hand to someone else?

One of my daughter’s teammates said she never sees the wall, only the ladder on the wall.

“Every wall has a ladder. You just have to find it, and then climb.”

She is 16 and wise beyond words.

In one of the lockup facilities where I spent several years the walls were not in the imagination of my students. They were real and, quite frankly, depressing.

I felt that it was my job to reduce the weight of the presence of the walls; even though these were walls that one couldn’t break through or climb over. Again and again I reminded my students that outside life is waiting for them.

I kept bringing in things like food and music, thinking that is what will help lift the weight of the walls.

All of those things were good and made the youth I worked with feel seen and heard, but I know that what really blew them away was when people would travel a considerable distance to see them for the culmination show.

“When you are behind the walls, Ms., you are forgotten,” a girl told me. “It’s easy not to see us, because we are hidden behind the walls.”

“Well,” I would say. “Let’s make sure you never come back here.”

But I knew saying that is so much easier than doing it. Sometimes a kid would get out and be back in less than a week.

“I will share your stories and we will let people peek inside the walls,” I would tell them.

“You matter!” I add.

I think the hardest thing faced by the precious kids in the lockup facility is that sitting behind the wall made them feel unnecessary and abandoned. If the figurative wall made my beautiful daughter running in the marathon want to sit down in the middle of the street, the actual wall for my incarcerated kids made them feel like sitting down and ending their life.

I would do everything I could to make things better. What l realized with the help of these kids is that actually walls are not broken from the outside in, but from the inside out.

The walls really aren’t supposed to be broken.

We are supposed to walk through them.

“You know what, Ms.?” a kid once asked me.

“I am the master of my thoughts.

I am the master of my attitude.

And you know what else?” he added. “When your guests came to see me, I realized that I can paint the picture for them and then put that painting on the wall.”

So, as we are all hunkered down at home, spending long periods of time with our family inside the walls of our homes, let’s remember that we are the masters of our thoughts and our attitude. We have the power to paint the picture we want to see.

Be safe. Be wise.

Stay healthy. Be as calm as you can.

We will get through this. I am sure.

Naomi Ackerman is a Mom, activist, writer, performer, and the founder and Executive Director of The Advot (ripple) Project a registered 501(c)3 that uses theatre and the arts to empower youth at risk to live their best life.