One spring break morning, I was sitting with my eight-year-old at a McDonald's playland. He was showing me something cool he'd figured out about Nike shoes. No matter how you toss one, no matter what angle it leaves your hand or how many times it tumbles through the air, as long as it doesn't hit anything in the way, it always lands right-side up. I laughed. Then I sat with it for a minute. Because that's the whole lesson.
You're going to get flipped around in this life. That's not a maybe. That's a guarantee. Jobs will go sideways. Relationships will crack. Health scares will come out of nowhere. People you trusted will let you down. The ground under your feet will shift, and sometimes it will feel like you're spinning in the air with no sense of where up even is.
The Spin Is Not the Problem
Most people fight the spin. They panic, they flail, they try to force their way back to stable ground before they even understand what happened. And that's where the real damage is done. Not in the fall itself, but in the frantic resistance to it.
A Nike doesn't fight the spin. It's built in a way that, if nothing collides with it mid-flight, the design takes care of the landing. The question isn't whether it will tumble. The question is whether something gets in the way before it can right itself.
That's true for men too. Most of us are more capable of landing correctly than we give ourselves credit for. The issue is the stuff we let hit us on the way down. Bad advice from people who don't know us. Old stories we keep telling ourselves. Habits that knock us off course every time we start to stabilize. Shame that smashes into us right when we're about to find our footing.
Built to Land
Endurance is one of the qualities I respect most in men. Not the kind of endurance that means gritting your teeth and white-knuckling through everything, but the kind that trusts your own design enough to stop fighting gravity and let yourself land. You were built with something in you that, if you can clear the junk out of the flight path, will bring you right-side up.
The men I work with who struggle the most are rarely the ones who got hit the hardest. They're the ones who don't believe they can land. They hit a hard season and decide that this time is different, this time there's no recovery, this time the spin is permanent. It's not. The design is still in you.
You're going to get tossed. Life is going to throw you in ways that feel completely disorienting. That's part of the deal. But you were made for this. Clear the path, trust the process, and land.
My kid taught me that over a Happy Meal. Sometimes wisdom shows up in a playland. Pay attention.