I chalked up one small personal victory this holiday weekend. I took myself out to see a movie. Bought myself a giant box of popcorn and mega coke deal and bought a ticket to the remake of The Karate Kid with Jaden Smith and Jackie Chan.

Now, it may seem a stretch to say going out on a Friday night to a movie alone to watch young Jaden Smith master Kung Fu and win the impossible martial arts tournament in China was my own personal victory in battle, but stretch or not it was a battle win for me in a double sense. You see, Charlotte and I always treated ourselves to a movie on holidays, especially Independence Day weekend over July 4th, because for the past 14 years the magazine’s July/August issue was finished and mailed by the holiday so we could relax and have some fun. But my going to the movies alone on Friday night was my own tournament battle victory in another sense, too. Since Char’s death, my battles against the demon loneliness are worst on weekends and my coping strategies boil down to gutting out long days and longer nights by burying myself at home in busy work and reading.

I can’t say the movie is great cinematic art but the triumphal theme of a victorious under-dog fit my sensibilities perfectly. I saw my own demons in the malevolent eyes of the villain Chinese kid whose martial arts motto was “show no mercy.” And I saw my paltry battle skills in the puny arms and effete moves of Will Smith’s young son as the newly-arrived, unwilling transplanted American kid forced to move to Beijing from Detroit whose life is made hell by the villain and his gang. Enter Jackie Chan as reclusive anti-hero janitor who hides beneath his dorky hat and demeanor a Kung Fu Master with the ability to turn a skinny kid into a consummate martial artist by teaching him to hang up his coat.

Okay. Silly, I know. But I like Jackie Chan. He always looks to me like he’s got a joke to tell, like he’s laughing all the way to the bank. And I believe laughter is the final triumph of the human spirit.

So there I was, facing my own demons of weekend loneliness and holiday bereavement, eating popcorn out the wazoo for my supper and downing enough coke to float a small boat, listening to Chan say, “Life may knock you down, but you can choose whether or not to get back up,” and the unlikely Karate Kid explaining to Chan in the tournament locker room why he must fight on in round three even with a broken leg– “Because, win or lose, I don’t want to be afraid anymore.” Both sentiments spoke to me and my ongoing bouts in the tournament of grieving, so I cheered for Chan and the Kid to win against the show-no-mercy malevolent villain in the third and final round of the Kung Fu tournament.

Taking myself out to the movies didn’t make the weekend go away or make Las Golondrinas any less big and empty when I got home. But returning home with the Karate Kid’s theme in my head that “Life may knock you down, but you can choose whether or not to get back up” gave new meaning to the Scotties’ rush to lick my face when I unlocked the door. Taking myself out to see a movie about gritty triumph over impossible odds, I found myself embracing in fresh ways a favorite quotation from Vaclav Havel:

“Hope is a state of mind, not of the world … Either we have hope or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul, and it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.

Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit and orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons …. Hope, in the deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more propitious the situation in whichy we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is.

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

So my thanks to Jackie Chan and to Jadon Smith and to Vaclav Havel, and most of all, to four-legged ‘corner men,’ Albie and Burnsie, who helped me win a notable fight in the tournament of grieving. Like the Kid, I’m choosing to get back up, to face my fears, to fight on, broken but unbeaten.

Joseph Harvill, publisher Great Scots Magazine