"To me this is the first principle of life, the foundational principle, and a lesson you can't learn at the feet of any wise man:
Get up! The art of living is simply getting up after you've been knocked down. It's a lesson taught by example and learned in the doing. I got that lesson every day while growing up in a nondescript split-level house in the suburbs of Wilmington Delaware. My dad, Joseph Robinette Biden Sr., was a man of few words. What I learned from him, I learned from watching. He'd been knocked down hard as a young man, lost something he knew he could never get back. But he never stopped trying. He was the first one up in our house every morning, clean-shaven, elegantly dressed, putting on the coffee, getting ready to go to the car dealership, to a job he never really liked. My brother Jim said most mornings he could hear our dad singing in the kitchen. My dad had grace. He never, ever gave up, and he never complained. "The world doesn't owe you a living, Joey," he used to say, but without rancor. He had no time for self-pity. He didn't judge a man by how many times he got knocked down but by how fast he got up.
Get up! That was his phrase, and it has echoed through my life. The world dropped you on your head? My dad would say,
Get up! You're lying in bed feeling sorry for yourself?
Get up! You got knocked on your ass on the football field?
Get up! Bad grade?
Get up! The girl's parents won't let her go out with a Catholic boy?
Get up!
It wasn't just the small things but the big ones
—when the only voice I could hear was my own. After the surgery, Senator, you might lose the ability to speak?
Get up! The newspapers are calling you a plagiarist, Biden?
Get up! Your wife and daughter
—I'm sorry, Joe, there was nothing we could do to save them?
Get up! Flunked a class at law school?
Get up! Kids make fun of you because you stutter, Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu-Biden?
Get up!"
Biden, Joseph R. Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2008, xxii-xxiii. Print.
