PaperWork: Pulling some truth from a silly scene in a funny movie

“Dodge and weave! Dodge and weave!”

That’s me shouting my life advice for the day. I usually say it with tongue in cheek. I am sort of joking, adding a bit of humor to a basic truth … that life is stressful.

Stress spills out over a wide spectrum. Trying to open a jar of pickles is one thing. Mourning the loss of a loved one is much different. Whatever the stress, I am told it does damage.

There are days I feel like I’m in the fast lane full of crazy drivers – and it’s full of potholes. I tell myself: “Dodge and weave! Dodge and weave!” That’s right. Some days, I am just trying to avoid collisions.

Maybe the keyword there is “avoid.” What’s ahead in my day usually includes a few things I don’t want to do. Things I don’t want to deal with.

So I dodge and weave through my day. Sometimes that works. And other times ... well, not so much.

My dodge-and-weave advice is a throwback to a funny movie I saw years ago called “The In-Laws” with Peter Falk and Alan Arkin. They are both fathers forced together because their children are getting married. Arkin is a dentist who leads a rather calm and normal life until he gets tangled up in a dangerous game with Falk, a CIA agent.

There’s a funny sequence when both men are running from a sniper shooting at them. Arkin starts running in a crazy pattern – left, then right, then left – while shouting, “Serpentine. Serpentine.” It’s an image that stayed with me, but I changed the wording for my own use.

I turned that movie memory into a bit of wordplay. It’s a goofy thing I say now and then. But then some serious advice landed in my email feed recently, and now the whole concept makes a lot more sense.

Every week, I get a “3-2-1 Thursday” email from James Clear, author of “Atomic Habits.” I’ve mentioned him before. This email offers me things I love: three ideas, two quotes and one question. (His questions always hit home. Example: “What hard lesson keeps repeating itself in your life because you refuse to learn it?”)

Now, let me share two of his ideas that got me thinking about Arkin and his running pattern as a survival tactic.

“Stories of failure resonate more than stories of success,” Clear wrote. “Few people reach the top, but everyone has failed – including those who eventually succeed. If you’re teaching people how to succeed in a given field (or talking about your own success), start with how you failed.”

He adds this: “Success is largely the failures you avoid.” Think about that. There’s that word “avoid” again. Yep, I’m thinking, “Dodge and weave. Dodge and weave.”

Then Clear adds some meat to that clever bone: “Health is the injuries you don’t sustain. Wealth is the purchases you don’t make. Happiness is the objects you don’t desire. Peace of mind is the arguments you don’t engage.”

“Avoid the bad to protect the good,” Clear concludes after offering an interesting way to look at the choices I face. Choices that are not always simple. And I will make wrong choices.

I learn from mistakes. As Clear notes, success comes when I avoid collisions in that fast lane I mentioned earlier.

It’s not always easy to know what to avoid, though. Or ... even if I know I should avoid something or someone, it’s still not always easy. Or I might be avoiding the wrong things. (I know I tend to avoid the treadmill.)

I’m pretty sure most of us are not running from a sniper and not every choice involves deadly fear. But I do skate through my days dodging and weaving around obstacles. My life, my career, has involved some explosions I had to dodge and many challenges to weave through.

I think Clear’s observation is valid. He sums up how we survive life’s struggles and prevail.

“Avoid the bad,” he says. Well, I can try. You win some. You lose some. But more important is what he added.

“Protect the good.”

• Lonny Cain, retired managing editor of The Times in Ottawa, also was a reporter for The Herald-News in Joliet in the 1970s. His PaperWork email is lonnyjcain@gmail.com. Or mail The Times, 110 W. Jefferson St., Ottawa, IL 61350.