“Can’t we just go in? It’s dry inside” I suggest to my wife. But she stands, resolute. Waiting for something.
After nearly 10 years of marriage I’ve learned to respect my wife’s stubbornness. Overcoming meningitis, losing a baby, being hit by a car, running her first marathon in under 4 hours, all this in the past three years. She’s had more difficulty than she expected but she has what renowned Professor of Child Psychology Ann Masten once described as ‘That Ordinary Magic’. The everyday ability to bounce back. Don’t let life squash you, let it shape you.
She’s not the only one. We all walk past people with this everyday. Perhaps we see them in the mirror too.
Silver Cars and Slow Motion Runners
We linger yards from a soggy Red Carpet where Duncan Goodhew and Daley Thompson pace from camera to camera. Men who lit up my Olympics as a kid. Celebrity after celebrity unfolds themselves from sleek silver cars, here for the film premiere 31 years after it’s original release. A film famous for slow motion running and that spine tingling Vangelis theme tune.
My wife won our tickets just a few days ago and has moved heaven and earth to make sure we make it. It’s not easy finding a babysitter for three kids at short notice. Not even when The Empire cinema is calling.
That’s when it happens. The Taxi Cab that changes everything. I can see a familiar face in the shadows. As Dame Kelly Holmes emerges with those legs of strength escaping first, a man starts yelling.
“Out the way, hey move it!” His camera is as big as his head. Click click snap. Something for the morning papers perhaps.
“Hey, do you want a photo” says Dame Kelly. But it seems she is talking to my wife. She is. Mr. TeleFotoLens is going mad, lurching from side to side like a car out of control, attempting to clear the road.
My wife steps out of the crowd and into her Moment.
I point and shoot. It’s a perfect picture first time. Dame Kelly and my wife, heads touching, smiles radiating, like sisters, arms wrapped around each other. It’s a black, white and double golden moment. On the long train ride home, the image becomes my wife’s Phone Home Screen, triggering smiles as she re-tells the story to me. Her Bounce Back moment, as if by winning tickets and totally by chance meeting her running icon Life has finally woken up and taken notice. Boy, should Life take notice of my Wife.
“C’mon move it”. Click Click Snap. Snapsnapsnap. The photo frenzy resumes. Umbrellas and elbows compete for pavement. We follow the Dame onto the Red Carpet where she looks at home, while we just loiter, really badly. I never realised just how bad I am at loitering. Anyone would think I have practised to be this conspicuous. The only red carpet in our house is where I spilt the wine.
Seizing The Moment
“Ask if she’ll sign our tickets” my wife says. It’s an instruction, not an enquiry. But then I can’t work out whether to start with ‘Kelly’ or ‘Dame Kelly’ or ‘Mrs.Holmes’. I’m really not in to the celebrity thing but athletes - well, they’re different. They have moved heaven and earth to achieve what they have. “What would my mum have said to her?” I muse. Losing my mum to cancer was why I started running silly distances that have at times meant getting out the door at 5am and arriving back at 11am, thirty-something miles on the watch. I began by running away from the Grief, but slowly found I was running towards something else. Exploring my own Greatness, perhaps.
Hidden Talents
I start on first name terms. I know I look star struck and I’m really trying not to but it appears looking stunned is another hidden talent I have. What I really want is to be sat in Caffe Nero with my wife and Kelly, having a mocha and chinwagging about running strategies, and inspiring young people to find their Greatness - which is all a bit like my job really. It’s why I left my job as a teacher and set up what our charity does, mentoring young people.
Before I know it, she’s signing her name and chatting to me like I’m an ordinary bloke. No, that’s not right. No, she’s chatting to me like she’s an Ordinary woman. Happy in her own skin, a bundle of genuineness and fire and curiosity.
Signs of Greatness
The Silver Mercs shunned for the Taxi Cab.
Personal photo-space generously shared with a random girl, my wife.
Asking questions in her Kentish-twang, not striving to become the centre of attention.
It’s all a sign of Greatness, surely. Greatness becomes all the more when it invites others in and shares itself. Even for a quick snap next to a London cabbie. It’s too easy in our modern lives to chill on the sofa and wait for Greatness to arrive. Greatness comes not to us. Here is someone with two Olympic gold medals and a long list of awards who shows her Greatness oozing through her Humanness. Greatness discovered through sheer dedication and resolve. Greatness untapped through the power of Ordinary Magic. She went and found it for herself.
The Speech of a Lifetime
“I want to compare faith to running in a race” says Eric Liddel to the crowd gathered in the Scottish rain. Our necks ache from being so close to such a big screen. I peek round to see a thousand people sitting behind me, absorbing the scene.
“It requires concentration of will, energy of soul” Eric continues. “You experience elation when the winner breaks the tape - especially if you've got a bet on it. But how long does that last? You go home. Maybe you're dinner's burnt. Maybe you haven't got a job.” We could all insert our own Personal Heartbreaks of recent years, it wouldn’t have been out of place. We all have our story, probably different to Eric’s story, whose life was to end from a brain tumour in 1945, stuck in a Japanese interment camp, away from his family. Gold medals are a mirror to an athlete’s immense conquests, not a shield from life’s tricky realities.
“So who am I to say, "Believe, have faith," in the face of life's realities?” Eric’s Scottish lilt is so easy on the ear. It’s the gentle sound of Ordinary Magic speaking.
“I would like to give you something more permanent, but I can only point the way. I have no formula for winning the race. Everyone runs in her own way, or his own way. And where does the power come from, to see the race to its end?”
The Question for us all
Good question, Eric. Where does power come from? From where does your Greatness arise? What is the starting place for Ordinary Magic?
“From within. Jesus said, "Behold, the Kingdom of God is within you.”
The cinematic scene fades but the truth remains. What a treasure we all carry. You and I, whatever our hidden talents may be - whether running around a track or loitering on a sodden red carpet, badly. What Ordinary Magic we all have. It took a chance encounter with a lady with the best calf muscles this side of the Thames to remind me of that.
Yes, Greatness can step out of a London taxi. But more importantly, it can remind me, you... us... of what we carry within ourselves, every Moment, of every Day.
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