The Willingness is All

When I was a kid, my siblings and I loved this movie about a boy and his team of dogs who set out to accomplish the seemingly impossible and compete to win in an international dog sled race and save his family farm. Disney’s Iron Will (the lesser known of G-rated films from the 90s featuring sled dogs) probably hasn’t crossed my mind in over a decade until I sat in a recent meeting whose speaker chose ‘willingness’ as the topic. I was trying to remember this discussion I’d once read about the word ‘will’ and somehow found myself at the thought that Iron Will was a lost gem from my childhood.

Played by Mackenzie Astin, brother of one Sean Astin (known for such roles as Samwise Gamgee from The Lord of the Rings and Mikey from the Goonies), Will Stoneham is a seventeen-year old who dreams of going to college away from the only life he’s known on his family farm in South Dakota. Though he says that he has everything he needs on the farm, he’s clearly experiencing some serious discontent and feels trapped in the life he’s grown up in. Like Will, we may not always realize the full extent of our discontent. Addiction provides a temporary departure from the mindset, but it cycles us into deeper grievance. Even in recovery, discontent can rear its head in various forms and distract from our work. The hard lesson we have to realize and that this film presents is that we have to engage in the struggle of life actively and willingly in order to achieve and maintain any sort of connectedness and fulfillment.

Early in the film, Will nearly collides with a military truck and engages in a brief conversation with one of the men, who asks him if he might be ready to fight a war when he turns eighteen. It might seem like a random encounter, but coming at the onset of the film as it does, it presents a pivotal question for Will and for us. Will we be able to fight a war when the time comes? Will, a bit confused, asks, “war with who?”, which merits a laugh from the army guy. His question reveals that he lacks awareness of the greater picture in which he lives; he may feel that he wants to explore life outside the farm, but he doesn’t realize the implications of leaving familiarity or growing up in a world of conflict. We also find out that Will has applied and gotten into college. His dad, Jack, tells him that if he really wants something, he has to go after it and grab it. He’s talking about college here, but the sentiment holds true for everything that Will has yet to face in the film and for everything we face in recovery. Jack tells Will, “Don’t let fear stand in the way of your dream, son.” He knows what fear of the unknown can do to someone’s dreams. Will may want to go to college, but his known life is the familiar way of the farm. Unlike Will, Jack is a man content with the life he has, which is why he says he doesn’t stand a chance of winning the race that he and his family talk about in one of the opening scenes. It’s a 500-mile race with a ten grand cash prize, but Jack says he doesn’t want it badly enough to win, despite his ability as a dog-sledder. He connects this reflection on motivation to his son’s feelings over college. He sees the discontent in his son, even if Will won’t admit to it. And he wants his son to be able to harness the will to go after a path that will lead to the reward Jack experiences as a man who knows contentment, acceptance and connection.

Will may not be sure what he wants, and his fear of changing the familiarity of what he knows holds him from going after something new. There’s nothing drastically wrong with his life on the farm, so he sees no need to pursue anything different. His discontent quickly shifts into something darker in the next scene, which is devastating. In a tragic accident, Jack’s dog sled skids into a river as he returns home with his son from felling trees in the woods. Seeing his father in the river, Will runs to pull along with Jack’s dogs to drag his father out of the relentless waters into which the other man has fallen. However, Jack, recognizing the futility of their efforts to pull him and his sled free, cuts the harness to prevent the dogs and his son from being pulled in along with him and sinks into the dark, chopping current as the dogs pull a screaming Will away to freedom. It happens fast, but there’s a lot to unpack there. Jack realizes his powerlessness, and rather than risk the lives of his son and dogs, he does the only thing he deems possible and allows the river to take him. It’s a gesture of love and surrender to a force he can’t control, and it’s a difficult decision, since it costs him his life and entails a loss greater than words can express for the ones he leaves behind.

Though Ned, the Native American farm hand who is pretty much family and a mentor figure to Will in place of his father, assures him that his father is still with him, Will is beyond comfort and blames himself and Gus, his father’s lead sled dog, for not saving Jack. In his discontented and now traumatized mindset, Will does not comprehend the deep connection that unites him with the higher power who took his father and the others in his life. Ned is in tune with this conscious connection, recognizing that “the river called him” and believing that Jack is still very much present with the souls he left on earth. That’s why the dog listens to him and not Will. Dogs seem to have a more natural time accessing that wave of connection than we do sometimes. Seriously though; if you look at the relationship between Will and Gus over the course of the film you can see when Will really starts to operate on the same wavelength that Ned, Jack and Gus are in touch with. Gus finally communes with Will when the kid meets him at his level. The white husky dog is like this guy who’s not going to compromise the language of his recovery to talk gibberish to someone who’s not ready to see with both eyes open yet.

So back to Will. He’s devastated with seemingly no solution other than to wallow in the known life that’s crumbling around him; however, there’s one morning when the sun thawing his window wakes him, and his attention is drawn to the flier for the 500-mile race his father had just recently said he personally didn’t have the drive to win. Will realizes a solution for at least part of the problem, recognizing that the prize can save the family farm that will most certainly fail without his father’s business to finance it. This is a great moment, all sunshine and jubilant background music to play up Will’s epiphany. It’s like that glorious experience of knowing there’s a solution within our grasp and being able to imagine a life free from addiction. We have no idea how hard the war is that will ensure that kind of life, but the realization is nice. A very different wake up from the brusque one he gets the next day when Ned grabs him out of bed in the darkness of pre-sun morning to begin training in earnest for that advertised race.

Ned’s training regimen is intense, and it involves sledding at night, so that Will “will be friendly with the dark,” he explains. I like this concept, because I think Ned’s character intends it with more than one meaning. He’s a pretty zen guy, so he not only means that Will’s familiarity with night racing will not limit his sledding to the hours granted by the sun; he also wants Will to become comfortable with discomfort. He wants Will to learn to face his greatest fears and accept them in his life as he would a friend. From my work in recovery, I’ve learned just how greatly fear has dictated and limited my life, often without my realizing it.

Will’s send off includes a couple more important interactions. His buddy Ward gifts him a special musher hat and expresses his sentiments, “I wish you could win,” to which Will responds, “I’ll win.” I love this exchange because it highlights the important distinction between wanting and willing. I hadn’t really thought too much about this difference until recently as I was thinking about the word ‘will’ at the meeting. I didn’t want to be rude and use my phone, so in lieu of Googling all the meanings and relations between them, I got lost in my mind mostly thinking about the ‘will’ related to desire and intent and the ‘will’ used to express futurity. I realized that these two can be one and the same. Take the Ward/Will exchange: I wish to win vs. I will win. One expresses desire and a probable intent, but the latter expression implies direct action leading to the desired result. The word ‘will’ can never be a statement of accomplished fact since no one can predict the future, but it gives us the intended action rather than just the hope of what the future holds. So when I say I’m willing to face a fear or willing to train for a race, it doesn’t just mean I want to do it. It means I’m doing it. The statement I’m willing includes the present participle of the verb, so it really means that the will is happening right as the statement is being uttered. Thinking about it this way, I realize that I’ve used that word wrong many times in my life. I’ve said that I’m willing to change, willing to try, willing to give someone or something a chance, willing to go after what I really want so many times without actually doing any of those things as I’ve spoken the words either aloud or just to myself. I wanted those things, but fear kept me from being willing to do those things and so many others. Now, when I say I’m willing to take the steps necessary for living a better life, I remind myself that words without action mean nothing, especially this one.

Just before Will boards the train, Ned gives him a whistle on which he plays Jack’s tune, the one he used for his dogs. Having imparted this piece of the boy’s late father to Will, Ned gives him some final words of guidance. Will, though as ready as he can be for the journey, admits his great fear of being alone out in the wilderness. Ned assures him of his strength and bravery, telling him that his father will be with him and to trust in himself and his dogs. He says, “when you come to face the thing you fear, let the Creator guide you.” Tell me this isn’t a movie about recovery. Ned is basically saying what anyone with strong sobriety will say of personal struggles. It can be hard to remember on the harder days, but once we have cultivated a sense of conscious connection with our higher power, ourselves and others, we are never truly alone and we have nothing to fear. If we are willing to trust the process and accept the blessings and challenges of life as they come, we live in communion with all life and our higher power. We can continue to move forward on our path even through the times that feel like setbacks by reaching for that sense of connection either in community with others, meditation by ourselves or through prayer. We are never alone, just as Will can find comfort in the truth that he doesn’t have to be alone on his 500-mile trek through the harshest elements of nature. Ned’s training has intended for him to recognize that this harshness is only an obstacle when seen as other, as unknown or an obstacle. Of course, Will needs to experience these truths for himself to possess the surety that Ned has of this connection with all life. He’ll get there. Bidding farewell to his familiar life in South Dakota and getting on the train to Canada is a good start.

The men assembled in Winnipeg for the race are from all different walks of life, and Will is almost excluded from the group of racers when it appears that he is short on money to cover the late registration fee. Journalist Harry Kinglsey (played by Kevin Spacey) sees an opportunity for a good story and covers his fee, and Will is accepted amid applause as one of the racers. This scenario is an apt reflection of the recovery community, a mingling of people with diverse backgrounds whose common goal unites them in spite of their differences. They may not all like each other, but they respect each other’s willingness to engage in the daunting challenge to which they’ve each voluntarily submitted themselves. It’s a Disney movie, so of course there’s a villain, and it’s an angry Swede by the name of Borg Guillarson. He asserts that Will won’t last a day on the trail and later tries to intimidate him, calling the race “the meanest stretch of land that God ever put together.” He’s not wrong about the mean part, and though he means it to deter Will, he’s also doing him a favor of sorts. He’s telling him straight up that it’s a journey that has killed good men, which is more honest than telling him that all his hard training in South Dakota will make this a walk in the park for him. The training may have been hard, but it’s nothing compared to what awaits Will on the 522 miles ahead of him. That training period was akin to an experience in rehab or the part before actually embarking on the work of recovery when you’re just hearing about it or learning what it entails. That part’s hard, but the real thing is harder.

It’s not necessarily hard because we’re trying not to drink or use whatever substance addiction kept as our jailor. I think that’s one common misconception: that the main difficulty of anyone in recovery is staving off the constant desire to drink. The constant desire isn’t really for a drink though; it’s for relief from the feelings and thoughts that drinking used to numb for a time. So the difficulty is really learning to live through ordeals in all the raw honesty of life without a means of escaping it.

The beginning of the race is all happy music and smiles as the sleds take off. Will races to get his team to the front, going at a pace the other racers frown at. Borg yells that he’ll be burying his team in Canadian ground if he keeps up that pace, but Will coasts ahead, buoyed by the thrill of the experience and the most well-rested he’ll be for the next 522 miles. He’s experiencing what it means to be part of something larger than the life he’s known, and he thinks he’s also experiencing what it means to be in the lead in this endeavor. Charging in front of the other racers with the cheers from the crowd fresh in his mind, Will cannot anticipate how drastically his race experience will change as it goes on. As the miles move forward, Will begins to experience the reality of the competition. He sees men drop from the race over time as they face mishaps and circumstances from which they are unable to recover. Will even becomes lost at one point when his trauma from witnessing his father’s drowning prompts him to circumvent a frozen lake rather than sled over it. His dogs, led by Gus, pull him to the next checkpoint as he lies in the sled, having passed out from cold and fatigue. The significance here is obvious: Will’s fear leads him off track, and his reliance on his team brings him back into the race.

Will persists in the race, his willingness to win apparent in his commitment to Ned’s words: sleep less, run longer. However, he doesn’t let his desire to win make him single minded. When he encounters Groven, one of the Icelanders, passed out in the snow and burning with a fever, he sacrifices valuable time to strap him to his sled and carry him while leading the man’s dogs to find help. This scene cuts to show Borg and Riley racing at high speed alongside each other; Borg uses his whip to flip Riley’s sled, sabotaging the other man’s race and laughing maniacally in the process. Both Borg and Will want to win, but their understanding of winning isn’t the same. Borg wants to win alone and will destroy anyone who shares his goal. Will, though he wants the money for himself and his family, wants everyone who has a stake in the race to finish with their lives. Will’s treatment of Groven appears to be something he just does because it’s the right thing to do; he doesn’t listen to Groven’s exhortment to leave him, and he doesn’t seek praise for his deed. His actions reflect his growing sense of connection despite the threatening isolation that could be his race experience. As if to further emphasize this communion Will has cultivated in himself with the people in his life, the following scene presents Will surrounded by his dogs for a brief rest. As he prepares to rouse them from their power nap, Will realizes that he has lost his father’s whistle (it broke from its strap while he rescued Groven); he doesn’t despair and whistles the tune sans instrument, successfully motivating his dogs into a run. This scene reflects on Will’s deep connection with Jack, even in his absence. Will no longer needs the medium of a material reminder to channel his father’s spirit; he finds that he has this power within himself. The sense of connection he has with his fellow racers and with his father impel his willingness to a higher level that inspires Kingsley to dub him Iron Will.

Will’s success is not viewed favorably by all, however - especially not by Angus McTeague, a sponsor of the race, who bribes Borg to sabotage Will’s lead. Borg of course takes the deal - he’d clearly be happy to do it for free, but five grand is a nice payoff for more villainy - and he sets his lead dog on Will’s team, leaving Gus bleeding and out of commision. Will faces a terrible decision now, since Gus - the dog whose respect has been hard earned yet who saved his life when he was lost and asleep - cannot run. He can either put the dog out of his agony (which he does contemplate) or risk his speed by subtracting the power of one dog pulling and adding that dog’s weight to his sled load. He chooses the latter. He understands that this dog is a crucial part of his race and a vital connection with his late father. Gus may not want the money, but Gus also share’s Will’s willingness to push beyond the normal limits of comfort and familiarity with conviction and determination. Sometimes in recovery, we have people in our lives who are harmful to our progress (Borg), and we have people who are willing to live the hard, beautiful life of recovery but cannot run the race on their own feet for a part of it due to circumstances beyond their control. We ultimately decide whom we trust and allow into our circle and whom we leave behind. When we listen to our higher power, we find the answer because the right people share in the sense of connection we work to develop in our conscious selves.

The race is hard from start to finish for various reasons, some consistent and some unique to certain situations. When McTeague’s deal with Borg fails to take down the young man, the sponsor tries bribing Will with a few thousand dollars to withdraw. Will wavers, since this is a guaranteed sum that promises security for his family if he takes it, but he quickly tells Gus that he’s not taking the money when the dog expresses disdain over the idea. Rather than take a portion of his initial goal, Will determines to continue racing, set on finishing the race and no longer purely motivated by the cash prize. I felt that this situation reflects the feeling of being in recovery and waiting for all those promises to come to fruition. It might seem easier to stop the hard work when a few things have gotten better or certain stressors have eased up, but we’d be quitting before the full reward has come to fruition. So even if we don’t have a guarantee on when or how those promises will enter our lives as realities, we know that we have to keep at it in order for the whole gift of recovery to be ours. In any situation in life when you’re working hard for something you really care about - a relationship, physical strength, a work of art, a job - you don’t just quit when you know you’re settling for good enough rather than great. Your passion and genuine desire to live well and achieve this goal in a fulfilling manner grants you the willingness to keep pushing through uncertainty, hardship and fear.

In pushing himself to the limits of his body and mind, Will is in rough shape on the final night before his last run. Kingsley, who has developed a genuine love for the boy that goes deeper than his initial appreciation for him as a headline worthy subject of journalism, tells him he needs a doctor and can’t go on. Will tells him it’s no longer just about winning or even just about him; a brief encounter with the people of a small town the race runs through have shown him that he is now viewed as a national hero for a country that faces the uncertainty of war and needs hope more than anything. He knows that he has to be that hero for them, and in being that hero he is being the truest version of himself as well. He recognizes that his race is also their race, and he does the next right thing he knows to be true and possible: he carries on.

Will determines to race and win in this competition, and he does it with a drive that knows no bounds because his action aligns with the desire rooted in his heart to honor his father and save his family. He becomes the man his father would have been and more because he faces the forces that took his father and perseveres through them with the support of his team and his community. They support him, root him on, and literally pull him through the cold tundra, but Will himself has to be the one driving the sled over those 500 miles and across the finish line. In the final day of the race, Will faces his fear of the river and sleds down a shortcut to St. Paul to pull ahead of the other racers who didn’t dare run by the river. Remembering Ned’s words, he knows that he can trust in himself and in his dogs to conquer the fear that has ruled him since losing his father.

Though he nears the finish line a half mile ahead of the next two contestants, Will’s sled tips just yards in front of the finish, and he struggles to right himself and continue due to the extensive level of his exhaustion and physical pain. In the terrible moments it seems he may not have the strength to carry on, Ned whistle’s the familiar tune now associated with Iron Will by all of America. The crowd (at least all those who can whistle) quickly joins in, emitting the tune that sends Gus, now recovered and back in the harness, into game mode. Even as Will has yet to regain his feet, his lead dog has already grabbed the harness and begun pulling with the other dogs to bring his team to victory. Will completed nearly the entire 522 miles due to his willingness to put his life on the line, to sacrifice comfort and to face fear. In learning to trust his dogs and like minded racers, Will has done important work in cultivating the strong sense of connection that motivates his heroic finish in the winning position.

Will’s race is anyone’s race; it’s a reflection of the light and dark we all experience in our lives in our honest endeavors to recover a true, meaningful way of being in the world. He starts out with an idea of the goal he wants and over the course of the 522 miles, he realizes the reality of what he’s seeking is so much more complicated than he ever imagined. On a simple level, Will wanted to win for the money that he imagined would save his family’s farm and fund his college dreams. Subconsciously, he also went after this challenge to feed the deep-seated longing for adventure and challenge that made it impossible for him to be truly content in a small town in South Dakota. The race also gave him a sense of purpose after his father died. These are the major reasons any of us chooses to radically upset our familiar lives, willing to experience discomfort and uncertainty for the promise of fulfillment and reward. In recovery, we give up the familiarity of our lives in addiction, finally accepting that there is no true happiness in a life ruled by something material and temporary in its relief. We could stay in the comfort of our known way of being, but we know that’s no way to truly live. So we embark on our own race without really knowing where the miles will take us. We may experience elation at the onset, knowing we are heading off on a worthy adventure to this next chapter of our lives, but we soon learn that each mile of this hajj brings with it its own unique obstacles and monsters that target our most primal fears.

Before the race even began, Will and his family had a sense of the challenge awaiting him. His mother reminds him before he boards the train, “you don’t have to die for it.” She means the money, but ‘it’ becomes a lot more than the money. It becomes more than a race for Will the longer he spends on the sled, and I think he’s willing to die for the more he has at stake. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the titular prince (who wanted to die from grief in Act I) says something about living that I often find myself coming back to in my mind. Talking to his friend Horatio, he explains his new understanding that there is providence in the deaths of every living being. We cannot change that providence, so “the readiness is all” (V.ii.). He means that truly living means being able to face the potential of death at all times. When it’s our time, it’s our time, so we ought to be living in a way that entails no regrets, no holding back from our true purpose, and no fear of an outcome we cannot control. Will finally achieves this readiness in his race. He is racing for more than just himself and a sum of money, and he recognizes the frostbite, the darkness and the weariness of his body as small prices to pay for going after such an incredible goal.

There is good along with the hardship though, and Iron Will gives us this side in a couple ways. Will’s growing relationship with his dogs and his clear love for them and for the family he holds in his heart the entirety of the way are reminders that we are never truly alone in any difficult journey when we have a connection to the life around us. He learns to trust the others involved in the race too, just as they learn to respect and care for his well being. Will endures immense physical suffering, but he experiences joy in the race as well. This mingling of dark and light in his circumstances is reflected in the landscape through which he and the other races move. The white snow and sky offset by the dark trees, rocks and waters provides a visual for Will’s and our experiences. The setting and our lives are both black and white, and sometimes shades in between. Because he is willing to embrace both the light and dark, Will achieves a triumph in winning that surpasses anything he would have merited had he had an easy time of it. During the race he is willing to sacrifice his comfort, risk his life and take time from his personal effort to help others in need, and his willingness to run an honest, selfless race is all that earns him a recovery of the sense of self and purpose that he’d lost for so long.