Big Trees, Deep Roots

The other day, I spent the afternoon on the wide front porch wrapped around a beautiful house that was built in 1830. A great breeze cooled us as my family and I watched boats glide down the Intracoastal Waterway, and gazed on the homes of Wrightsville Beach, along the Atlantic Ocean, just across from us. Some of the oak trees on the property were amazing - with trunks so thick you couldn't get your arms around them, and soaring into the sky. There was even a tree house on the one acre property, built high in a spreading oak in 1904, and with a spiral metal staircase rising up to it. 

The house had stood and the trees had grown through nearly two centuries of coastal storms, as well as sunshine. And both the storms and the beautiful days had contributed to the beauty we experienced.

I was reminded of a statement once made by one of my favorite stoic philosophers, Seneca, who wrote this in first century Rome, in an essay called "On Providence":

Why, then, do you wonder that good men are shaken in order that they may grow strong? No tree becomes rooted and sturdy unless many a wind assails it. For by its very tossing, it tightens its grip and plants its roots more securely - the fragile trees are those that have grown in a sunny valley. It is, therefore, to the advantage of good men, to the end that they may be unafraid, to live constantly amidst alarms and to bear with patience the happenings that are ills only to him who ill supports them.

As Florida Scott Maxwell wrote in her incredibly wise little book The Measure of My Days, the things that we most resist and dislike, the things that cause us the most worry and pain, are often the very things that strengthen and deepen us the most, if we do our best to respond well. The storms of life can work a magic in us that transforms us into the people we're capable of being. Remember that in your next storm. Put out deeper roots, and grow tall.

Using the Power of the Mind

How do you use the power of your mind? In the weight room, my workout partner prepares himself for a really heavy bench press lift by vividly imagining a guy in college who tried to steal his girlfriend. And by visualizing this nemesis, he mentally takes himself back in time and gets really mad. He feels the anger. And he says it fuels his strength and his subsequent accomplishment with the lift.

It's amazing to me that he can still get so worked up about something that happened thirty years ago. But he can. And he uses it well. But I can't do that. I take a really different approach.

When I lie down on the bench with three hundred pounds or more looming over me, I go to a happy place. I imagine a beautiful day at the beach near my home. The sand is soft, and just the right hue of very light beige, the sky is an amazing blue, with a few little puffy white clouds floating by, over to the east and the water is a stunning aquamarine, with great waves tossing off sparkling whitecaps.

My workout partner likes to call this my "Puppies, Butterflies, and Rainbows Approach." But it works. It Zens me out and lifts me up. It's exactly what I need. I don't try to talk my friend out of his college rage re-creation, despite my worries about his blood pressure. And he doesn't try to get me away from those cute little puppies on the beach. We use different approaches, but to the same end - to get our minds into a place where we can draw more deeply on the resources we have, in order to face the challenge that confronts us.

What do you do? Should you do more? Those puppies could use some attention.

The Two Hardest Things

We're told that the holiest spot in ancient Greece, the Oracle at Delphi, had two inscriptions of advice chiseled into marble to welcome all visitors, who typically came for advice. They were:

Know Yourself.

Nothing in Excess.

The longer I live, the more I come to appreciate the depth and practicality of these two recommendations. Ironically, knowing yourself may be the hardest thing in the world. And why? Nothing is closer to you than your own self. But it's protected by layers of obliviousness and self-deception. Getting to really know yourself is like peeling back the layers of an onion. And it might bring tears. But nothing is more important for living a good, successful, and happy life.

As hard as self knowledge has been for me, avoiding excess has been even tougher. I'll eat too much, drink too much, work too much, exercise too much, and talk too much. I may even blog too much. But that's me. I'm lucky I lived through my twenties, with all the stupid excessive things I did. And I'm just coming off two months' worth of muscle strains from taking a perfectly good exercise in the gym, and doing an insane amount of it in an excessively short time.

Aristotle nailed it. Excellence is always somehow about identifying the too little and the too much and equally avoiding them both. Virtue, as he said, or strength, in a more modern idiom, is about finding what's just right. 

And the two recommendations at the Oracle are of course connected. You don't know yourself unless you understand your limits and what counts for you in any domain as "excess." And you can't avoid excess unless you truly know yourself, what motivates you, what prompts you, and when you're most likely to make bad decisions that cross the line.

So here we are millennia later, and I can't think of much better advice than what was carved out of that marble so long ago. Maybe these ancient admonitions could be the basis for some 2015 New Year's Resolutions. Maybe they'd be good guides for the days to come. But, knowing myself as I do, I have to avoid implementing them ... excessively.

Difficulty, Struggle, Hardship, and Beauty

The greater the difficulty, the greater the glory.

 Cicero

Hardly anything worth doing is easy. But that’s ok. The harder we’ve had to work for something, the more we appreciate it once it happens. The great essaist Montaigne once made a related point when he said: “The honor of the conquest is rated by the difficulty.”

If you’re working toward a noble goal, something truly worth your time and effort, then don’t let it get you down when the process of realizing your dream takes a lot more time and work than you had imagined. Think about the sense of satisfaction that ultimately awaits you. And hang in there now. Satisfying success will justify your struggle.

"But what if I don't succeed after all the struggle?"

I'd be disappointed if you didn't ask. And yet, the answer is simple. If you succeed through struggle, you can grow. If you fail through struggle, you can grow. To grow is not to fail, but to succeed in one of our most important tasks in this life. So, if you struggle well, you can't completely fail. One way or the other, you succeed by growing.

Let me quote Elizabeth Kubler Ross:

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people don't just happen.

Difficulty, struggle, and hardship can create beauty, if we let it - beautiful results, beautiful growth, and a beautiful strength within. So, when you struggle, struggle with your head up, and your hope afloat. Something good can happen from this. Beauty can result.