Wolverine, by contrast, does not have a pretty bone in his body. He is gruff, and nasty, and animalistic. He constantly tows the line between being a good guy and a villain. And yet when he took center stage on the big-screen during the X-Men movies over the last several years, audiences loved and admired him.

It isn’t Wolverine’s adamantium skeleton that makes him superbly unique. Rather, it was his ability to heal– to not be hurt– that allowed for the adamantium skeleton in the first place. Let’s back up…

Wolverine was born with a genetic mutation that allows him to heal at an accelerated rate. Almost any wound or disease is corrected for by his body. This allowed Wolverine to survive the military’s experimental process of fusing his skeleton with a near-indestructible metal called “adamantium”, thus making him virtually impervious to harm.

Wolverine’s real power resides not in his claws. It resides in the fact that he cannot be scarred too deeply; it resides in the fact that his wounds are not substantial wounds, not deep, but mere flesh wounds, to be felt and glossed over, felt and forgotten as soon as they are experienced. His wounds do not stop him, and they do not define him. They happen, and they pass.

All my life, I let things affect me too deeply. I placed too much importance and too much weight into little things– all things. I viewed everything as important, as a life-and-death issue.

But as I grew, I wanted to be Wolverine. I wanted to be able to walk away from a battle– from stress, problems, drama– without a scratch. I wanted to be impervious to harm. I watched those around me affected by the trivial, caught up in the mundane, freaking out about little things and missing the bigger picture.

Now a new look in my eyes, my spirits rise,
Forget the past, present tense works and lasts.
New life in place of old life, unscarred by trials.
A new level of confidence and power.
(Pantera, A New Level)

And I learned: yes, Wolverine still feels pain, but it only touches him so deep. It only goes down to a certain level, and then it stops… and sits… and nobody and nothing can force it to hurt more.

So I decided I would be Wolverine, but my own version, without the genetic mutation. I would be impervious to pain, and guilt, and fear. I would make the decision to not let things touch me so deeply. I would learn to let it roll off my back.

“God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time. Enjoying one moment at a time. Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace.”

I decided to lace my own bones– my own spirit– with adamantium, to make it impervious to the small and trivial blows dealt by life. Certain things matter. Many things matter. And many things don’t. I decided to take the time to sort them out, to tell the difference and rank them.

The decision to be Wolverine, to be indestructible, is not something magically discovered. It is not something one is born with. It is a choice. It is choosing to fully accept and acknowledge the fact that only you are responsible for your own happiness; that the circumstantial and uncontrollable aspects of your life are ultimately irrelevant and contribute in no large part to your current place in life. Lining your soul with an adamantium skeleton and attacking life with adamantium claws is not hard-wired in one’s person. It is not gifted from an external source. It is selected, consciously, as a method and mode of approaching the world.

Whatever my future may hold, I am fully aware that only I can determine my state of happiness and joy.

That state is not something handed to me by others, or something that I will stumble upon while wandering aimlessly through this life. It is, rather, waking up with the choice to be happy, overjoyed, and blissful.

So fly away, Superman, and save the world. Your life is near-perfect, and that’s great– must be nice to be born with alien powers that make you super-human.

The rest of us, by contrast, will be left to undergo our own experiment, to see if we can withstand the transformation from beings of terminable resolve to beings of indestructible spirit.

To see if we can face our trials, and come out unscarred.

To be less than perfect, and still be perfect, just without the fairytale curl atop our brows and flowing cape and tights.

True strength is not an innate trait. It is the ability to make the most of everything around us. It is an orientation towards the world. It is the resolve to keep external factors from affecting us any deeper than we decide is acceptable.

It is a trait we choose, and must continue to choose, each and every day.

-David A. Johnston

Think of it like building your ultimate dream house. You would not merely settle for what was “available”. Once you had the property purchased, and the shell or structure of the home placed upon that property, you would then focus on the bigger task at hand– turning that “house” into a “home”. Which would mean what, exactly? It would mean picking your colors and your decorations– your paintings, the music in the background, your lighting. It would mean arranging your furniture in a way that was practical and used the space economically, meeting your needs and hopefully helping you to function at peak efficiency. It would mean replacing the tacky wallpaper with beautiful rich colors, or ripping out the stained carpet in favor of rich hardwood flooring. It would mean making each and every aspect important, and perfect.

I have long been a fan of the stylized movie– Hero, House of Flying Daggers, 300, The Matrix, Sin City. The films show an individual at the helm who leaves nothing to chance. And even if you think these movies are terrible, and thus might not be a fan of the end product, there is no doubting the internal logical consistency of the universe presented by the artist.

But what if we could reverse the process? What if we could take the model of the film, where every aspect is consciously selected, and apply it to our own lives? What if we could make our lives into movies?

I have often said that at the end of the day, I want my life to play like a highlight reel, a series of stories and tales so far-fetched and ridiculous that a stranger, upon hearing them compiled, would refuse to believe they belonged to a single real person. I want to make sure my life is lived not like a naturalistic character study, replete with drawn-out shots focusing on the mundane; but rather, a stylized action movie, with over-the-top romance, melodramatic persona’s, ridiculous series of events that could never happen in the real world…

…the real world… an interesting concept. And by that, of course, we mean “the average world”. We mean the world of not rocking the boat, right?

But what if we took it upon ourselves to rock that boat? To go on strike against that world, and reinvent it? What if we were to treat our lives like a script that had to be narrowed down to 120 pages, and we wanted those 120 pages to have internal consistency, excitement, stories bursting off the page, characters unique and never-before-encountered? What if we had to select the music to go along with particular scenes? What if we had to choose the costumes, and the lighting?

When I sense those moments of importance in my life, I try to step back, to hover above my own body, watch from a third-person perspective, and take it all in, like a scene from a movie. I try to understand the beauty of the situation, even when it’s painful or difficult, and see how it logically flows from the previous scene, and necessitates the next page of the script. I try to take a mental snapshot– not a memory, but an image containing how I feel, what I think, what I heard, what I smelled; I try to hear the music, and the particular phrasing, and how the grammar and word choice rolls off the tongue; I try to make a lighting-fast edit in my head and ask, “Does this make for good copy?; Will this sell tickets to my movie?”

I have to remind myself that I’m the producer, and the star, and the final product is mine to be proud of– or not. I have to remind myself that there is no director of my film besides myself, no one waiting in the wings to yell “Action!” when something needs to get done, and “Cut!” when I get a break. There is no one to coach me on my lines, or my presentation.

There is just me, and my movie– my life. And it can be internally consistent, with a logical beauty and elegance; with hand-selected colors and sounds; with movements echoed by sonic swells; with physical appearances reflecting the internal status of characters. Or it can be a hodge-podge of elements randomly thrown together, with no theme song, no motif, no beginning, middle or end; no moral to be told; no rhyme or reason; a simple product of happenstance, with the protagonist at the end declaring, “How the hell did I get here?”

I vow to make mine the former, with all 120 pages jam-packed with so much ridiculousness that nobody will ever believe it all belonged to one person. Fully stylized, and fully rocking the boat.

-David A. Johnston

“A great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.”– Walter Bagehot

All my life, I’ve been terrible at taking direction, not for lack of intelligence, but lack of understanding why somebody would be interested in doing something simply because “that’s the way that things are done”. Right out of the womb, I had to figure things out the hard way, figure them out on my own, or I couldn’t figure them out at all. If there was a “wrong way” of doing things, I did it, just to see why it was the “wrong way”.

Wearing thermal underwear in the middle of 100-degree Chicago weather in July? I’m going to try it. And shorts in the dead of winter? Sign me up.

I like “learning the hard way”.

I never understood etiquette, or the function of etiquette, or why anybody would want to follow etiquette.

I don’t understand “rules”. I mean, I understand rules of the universe, like gravity, or cause and effect; but I never understood “the rules” that I was expected to play by, the “rules of man” so to speak. I like to view them more as suggestions, and then test them, and break them, with a condescending grin.

At the age of 8, I decided I wanted to grow my hair long because my passion was hard rock music, specifically Guns N’ Roses. My father told me I could do it, so long as I understood that I would have to work that much harder to prove my intelligence to those around me– that I would most likely be perceived as “different”, and possibly “worse”, for choosing something so outside the norm. It has become a cliché in our culture that “perception is reality”. Maybe this is true for those whose reality is dictated exclusively by the opinions of others. To those of independent spirit, reality is reality– or taking it a step further, reality is what you chose to make of it, what you will it to be, not what you chose to let others make of it for you.

When I arrived in Columbia, Maryland, and had to rebuild my personal training business from scratch, the “normal” thing to do would be to present one’s self as approachable and friendly so as to attract as much potential business as possible. And of course, what was my business concept? To grow out a Mohawk and long goatee so as to look as unapproachable as possible. Why? Because I wanted to take the harder path– or more importantly, because I wanted to prove that I could do what people said I could not, and should not, do. I wanted to show that it was irrelevant, that there were more important factors involved in rising to the top and being successful. Within less than a year’s time, I had the top sales record at Lifetime, Columbia, purported “bad attitude” and Mohawk included. All the “perceptions” out there proved to not really be an issue.

This year, I have decided to compete again in several bodybuilding competitions. Prepping for a competition is like a full-time job in and of itself. I have decided to prep, while running a very time-consuming business, and while having a new child at home. I was told several times last year from close friends and family that I might not be able to do it, that I might be stretching too much, that it might be unreasonable to try to accomplish all of these things at once. Being told I couldn’t do it was all the more reason to make it happen.

I am now 10 weeks out from the NPC Philadelphia show on June 26th, and feeling great about my chances at winning.

Indeed, a great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.

The self-proclaimed Greatest of All Time:

-David A. Johnston

4/17/2010

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