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Sunday, March 05, 2006
Fran’s Sunday Ruminations: On Being True To Yourself
"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to know the difference." -- Reinhold Niebuhr's "Serenity Prayer"
Courage occupies the top spot in the pantheon of virtues. For as C. S. Lewis has told us, every virtue takes the form of courage when it's put to its severest test. That being the case, let it be said plainly and at once: We humans are not a notably courageous lot.
That stands to reason, doesn't it? We wouldn't consider courage a great virtue if it were the rule rather than the exception. We wouldn't celebrate courageous men and their deeds if they were many and not few. All the same, it's rather a shame. Courage is so central to the attainment of a good and worthy life, so irreplaceable as the fuel for worthy deeds, that a shortfall of it cannot be made up by an oversupply of any other asset.
It's appropriate that one of the most common metonymies for courage is "backbone." Our backbones keep us upright and straight despite gravity's relentless efforts to flatten us. Our courage keeps us upright, straight, and true to ourselves when all the rest of the world is bellowing demands for our surrender.
The "upright" and "straight" parts are fairly easy to understand. What I'd like to talk about this morning is the importance of being true to oneself.
Honesty is universally...well, except among Muslims...acknowledged to be a virtue. Most of the people I've known are largely honest toward others. But they tend to be less honest toward themselves.
There are certain questions about ourselves that we find it difficult to ask. The reason, of course, is that we fear the answers...sometimes even though we already know them:
- What are my strengths?
- What are my limitations?
- What are my needs, both for survival and for happiness?
- What good things might I be doing that I'm reluctant to do?
- What bad things do I do that I know I ought to give up?
There are others, but these will do for the moment. All of them flow from a "higher" pair of questions that are seldom asked today. Indeed, when they were asked, it was mostly by persons who had no intention of answering them honestly:
- What am I? That is, what is my organic nature?
- Who am I? That is, what are my specific individualities?
The first question addresses those natural aspects of ourselves we cannot change. The second addresses those areas in which nature, nurture, or the exertion of will has formed our identities. The tendency these past few decades has been to displace these questions in favor of a fantasyland substitute:
How would I like to see myself and the world around me, if I could have my imagination's druthers to the uttermost limits of space and time?
If that question strikes you as pointless, you're not alone. Yet it was the envelope-inquiry of virtually every whiny demand of the "rebels" of the Sixties and Seventies: youngsters with neither experience nor knowledge nor appreciable skills, who nevertheless felt they had a right to "have it their way." They tried to convince themselves that if they held hands long enough and sang all the right songs, they could reshape human nature, and a few of the more irritating laws of physics and economics, to conform to their whims. Some still believe it, despite the evidence.
Most of those folks today work for the government, in the Old Media, or teach in the "public" schools. And if that thought sends a trickle of fear sweat down your spine, you're not alone.
You can't be true to yourself without knowing both what and who you are. Doubtless when Alexander Pope proclaimed that "The proper study of Mankind is Man," he had something like that in mind.
Concerning what we are, we have about six thousand years of spottily recorded history to study. It tells a fairly consistent tale. Man's most important learning-about-himself episodes have been the most painful. Worse, they've been the ones the most people have been the most ardent to ignore. Still, the evidence is there for all to see and contemplate:
- Force cannot create; it can only destroy, and therefore must be reserved for those occasions when destruction is both right and necessary.
- Power over others is intrinsically dangerous, even when wielded by persons of sterling character with the best of intentions.
- Calamity follows upon every attempt to treat human beings as malleable means to an end, regardless of the end or the intentions of the manipulators.
- There is no substitute for truth, honesty, and plain dealing among men.
- Pandering to whining, envy, and savagery does not assuage those things; it excites more of them.
These laws are graven into our natures as men. We cannot undo them by any exertion of effort, and certainly not by ignoring them or wishing them away. Still, the efforts persist, and some of the persisters are persons of noble nature with the highest of intentions. Which is why I've come to deplore the vilification of persons of opposed political views. They're not necessarily evil; they might just be wrong. For that matter, I could be wrong, too.
To be true to yourself, you must also know who you are: that is, the specific constellation of characteristics pertinent to the individual you. For while your nature puts one sort of envelope around your aspirations, your identity wraps you in another.
You might possess any of many gifts. You might be strong, quick, bright, creative, insightful, empathetic, perseverant, eloquent, or persuasive. You might be all these things! But more important than the specifics is to acknowledge that you are someone specific, some of the elements of which are not within your power to expand or contract. This is a critically important bit of candor when choosing your goals, or plotting a course toward what you think will make you happy.
But your gifts and abilities aren't the only things germane to your goals and your approach toward them.
One of my stepdaughters is a highly gifted young woman. Until recently, her expressed ambition was to go into medicine, probably pediatrics. Beyond question, she has the mental horsepower, the resolve, and the endurance to make it through. She's exhibited all of these qualities through her first two years in college, such that no one who knows her would dream of doubting that she could do what she'd declared that she would.
But a few days ago, she announced that she'd changed her mind. Medicine is not for her; she's decided to steer for some other path that will leave her the time and energy necessary to marry, have children of her own, and raise them properly. At the moment, she's considering becoming a science teacher, which squares nicely with those priorities.
Let that sink in for a moment. This girl is capable and more; indeed, I think it likely that she could do anything she might set out to do. But she knows herself. In particular, she knows her priorities, knows what sort of barriers a career in medicine would put before them, and has rationally concluded that her priorities and that career are not compatible. Does she have any regrets about it? A few, but not enough to provoke her wishful-thinking centers -- hey, we all have them -- into constructing a fantasyland in which a young medical student or resident doctor serious about both medicine and child-rearing could give the required time and devotion to both.
It would have been impressive reasoning from anyone; from a twenty-year-old, continuously bombarded by messages from a world that insists that "you can have it all," it's near to blinding.
I am a very fortunate, very happy man. I have a satisfying trade in which I've done well, a wife I love dearly, two worthy stepdaughters, a home that provides me with both security and comfort, two dogs, five cats, a garage filled with power tools, and a paucity of worries for the future. But I didn't always have those things. First I had to admit that I wanted them. Then I had to take steps to acquire them. Then I had to invest the required effort in maintaining them. Then, to get the full value available from them, without which all the previous effort would have been wasted, I had to keep myself mindful that they were what I wanted and had consciously striven after, even if they'd proved not to be what I wanted after all.
It's the first and last of those steps that cause the most people the most difficulty.
Robert Ringer, in his book How You Can Find Happiness During The Collapse Of Western Civilization, exhorts his readers to ask themselves three questions:
- What do I want?
- What will it cost me in time, energy, pain, and sacrifice?
- Am I willing to pay the necessary price?
Ringer spends little time on the first of my questions. Perhaps he thought what any individual wants ought to be obvious to him. But it isn't so today, and perhaps hasn't been for a long time. As to the last of my questions -- how to preserve the value to oneself of those things one has striven after -- he gives it no time at all. Yet without a full, candid examination of one's priorities, his methods, upon which Ringer's rubric concentrates, can come to naught.
The reason the inquiry into one's values and desires is so challenging is that a great portion of any man's values and desires are beyond his power to change. Yet messages from all around him constantly tell him that he ought to want this and not that. In effect, they urge him to leave off being true to himself and follow their lead instead. Some stay true; others succumb.
In choosing my own path through life, I had to learn to tune out the suggestions of others about what I ought to do with my opportunities. The directives were unrelenting: "With your abilities, you ought to be a scientist...a lawyer...a statesman...a traveler...a writer...a teacher...a priest." Because I had a large number of willing advisors -- there's seldom a shortage of such -- it took me more than thirty years to get clear of them. Only then, with silence re-established, could I ponder what I wanted and valued most, and what I was willing to do to get it. And only then, having acquired a few things I wanted, and a few others I'd thought I wanted, could I appreciate how very hard it is to be honest with oneself about that most intimate of subjects.
God offers no apologies. He makes you as you are and sends you forth; the rest is up to you. Most of us come into life fairly well equipped, though there are some unfortunates, and as always, circumstances can alter cases to an indefinite degree. But beyond that, most of us possess the means to get what we want...just as soon as we figure out what that is.
The thought I'd like to close with is this: A great part of what you value and desire derives from what you are. It's utterly beyond your power to change. It's just as far beyond anyone else's power to change it for you. Effort put toward changing it -- that is, effort put toward denying your human nature -- is wasted and worse; it's an attempt to will away reality, which obeys laws no Act of Congress can supersede.
But even in that portion of your priorities that derives from who you are, your power to impose changes on yourself is likely to be very limited. Granted, we can acquire certain tastes by habituation, and lose others by deliberate abstention or neglect, but these are always trivial matters. In serious things, your values are at the core of your identity; they cannot be significantly altered without destroying your conception of yourself...without destroying you.
Here as above, the dictates of the crowd are irrelevant to what you must have to be successful and happy. Others don't want marriage or children, but you do? Others enjoy wild, intoxicated revels, but you don't? Others worship affluence and opulence, but you'd be happy with less? Others deride charitable involvements as "for suckers," but you find them worthy and fulfilling? Others ridicule churchgoers as "superstitious fools" with "imaginary friends," but you find faith and worship to be vital and fulfilling? Why let those others, however fashionable, do your wanting for you? Why let them make you feel unworthy for being who you are?
Are you not a man? Isn't a man's principal obligation among men to be true to himself? "And it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not be false to any man." Right?
Isn't that reality -- the envelopes imposed on your values and desires by your nature and individual identity -- the plainest possible expression of God's will for you?
May God bless and keep you all.
Comments
"a man’s gotta know his limitations"-Dirty Harry Calahan/Clint Eastwood.
Happiness for me has always been to aspire just beyond my limitations. I find then, that my limitations change. Usually expanding.
Posted by og on 03/05/2006 at 11:52 AMThank you. As you may, or may not, have noticed, I am not blogging regularly these days. This, however, deserves linkage far and wide. Thanks again.
P.S. You need to update your copyright dates at the bottom of the page(s).
Posted by ELC on 03/05/2006 at 11:17 PMYou can’t know what your limits are until you exceed them - Miles Vorkosigan. Not a direct quote, been a while since I read that scifi story.
Too many people place a low limit on themselves and then coast.Posted by on 03/06/2006 at 12:52 PMNot quite, Frank. You can’t know what your limits are until you’ve tried to exceed them—and failed.
If it can be exceeded, it’s not a limit; it’s merely a challenge.
Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 03/06/2006 at 12:59 PM"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures.”
- Daniel WebsterPosted by Russell on 03/06/2006 at 06:45 PM
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