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Thursday, September 2, 2010

Under Pressure

"Sometimes I feel like a basket case," a friend of mine confided yesterday morning.  This is a man I have always known, over the several weeks we have been acquainted, to be confident and self-controlled.  Lately, he's had more than a few challenges thrown his way, and he has been feeling the strain.  When I told him I had always admired him for his strength, he was a bit skeptical.  I stood my ground, though.  After all, he has told me over and over again how strong I am, and I don't think of myself as strong at all.  I reckon turnabout is fair play.

I've been getting a lot of that lately, from my family and friends.  Everyone seems to think I'm tremendously strong.  I'd love to know what they see that I don't.  All I know is that I'm the first to concede in any argument, I spent my childhood getting picked on by the kids everyone else picked on, and I recently got out of a relationship with a partner who hit me twice and berated me constantly - but I got out only because she dumped me.  Apparently, when the going gets tough, the tough resort to appeasement gestures.  And when the going gets really tough, they curl up under furniture in the fetal position.

But maybe that's the thing about strength: it doesn't matter how strong you are until push comes to shove and you're already feeling the strain.  Think about an Olympic weightlifter.  He braces himself physically before he picks up the weight, then takes a few deep breaths before lifting it slowly from the ground.  As he brings the weight higher, he makes whatever minor alterations or corrections are necessary in his posture, his grip.  He feels himself fighting the force of gravity, wrestling deep in his muscles with the very laws of nature.  The sweat of exertion beads on his forehead.  His teeth are clenched; his breaths are heavy and loud and sometimes come out as involuntary groans.  The sinews in his arms, working at full capacity, scream achingly for relief.  But the athlete focuses away from the pain of the moment, letting his goal push all other thoughts from his mind.  And when he finally does set down the weight with one last loud gasp, the cheers of the crowd ringing in his ears, he finds himself the holder of a new world record.

Now, I have experienced all those things myself: the sweat, the ache, the clenched teeth.  But the burden I struggled to carry - a large box of books, perhaps - was a mere fraction of the weight our athlete had to lift.  If the athlete had been there to carry my books for me, he would have swept them up easily, made it seem effortless.  There would be nothing in his demeanor that would suggest he was performing what would be, for me, a tremendous feat of strength.  In testing his own limits, though, he feels and shows the strain.  The moment in which he performs his most difficult feat, one that most of us could never hope to achieve, is the moment in which he struggles as much as I do just moving the couch to vacuum under it.

It is not the lack of stress in our lives that determines our mental fortitude, but the amount of stress we are able to endure without breaking.  The more pressure there may be on us, the more we show the strain: anxious, fretting, irritable, skittish, self-indulgent, and cowering, in whatever combination suits our temperament and condition.  These are not symptoms of weakness, but the manifestations of strength in action.

2 comments:

  1. In the past you may have been France, but now you are gradually going Israel. Good post...

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  2. I like this post very much. Oh, and I do think you're strong. *smiles*

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