The Fight Out Of The Dog

I ready myself for work, struggling past the effects of an end of fall cold, wishing, perhaps, that I could just stay in bed. It is no different than dragging oneself out of bed for work in the morning, except that it is not really morning. No matter what the time, though, work is work, and fight is fight. And I have had enough moments of being without both that on this particular day, I am happy to have a reason to struggle past.

It is said that "you can take the dog out of the fight, but you can't take the fight of the dog." While I know virtually nothing about dogs, I do know that lousy has to be pretty lousy to keep me from struggling past. Five years ago, I was facing the end of my time at ABC, but the fight in me allowed me to celebrate what had been and think to the future. Four years ago, my plans for the future didn't quite turn out how I'd expected, but the fight in me kept me from giving up. And in the years since, I've faced bumps in the road, from jobs that didn't pay to job to job gaps that seemed interminable. I owe the fact that I am still in the game to a bit (or more than a bit) of luck along the way. But I also owe it to the fact that I haven't given up. Each time I have been taken out of a "fight," I have managed to summon my strength to go into the next one. I don't always win--do any of us? But whether it's through a cold or through something farther outside of myself, I get up and fight. Because you can maybe take the dog out of the fight. But you definitely can't take the fight out of the dog.