Strength grows under pressure, and flexibility is forged in response to various changes in motion. Stability is hidden in the roots, the fundamentals, the invisible that stretches from every cell and into the core.
We strive for greatness, and at the same time, curse the tides and forces that enter our lives and disrupt the sense of control we love so much.
Where do we gain that strength and greatness if not on the training ground?
Some martial artists say that the strongest person is not the one who can generate the highest force, but the one who can redirect the strongest force that enters their orbit. The one with enough agility and grace, and whose feet are rooted so deeply into the ground that with just a slight move of their body, they bend the incoming force and send it off in another way.
Those artists use the momentum of the opposition in their favour. They carry themselves not in the manner of trying to block and deny what they’re about to face; rather, for a split moment, they surrender to it, become one with it, and embrace the very force that was aimed to damage them.
They wield the force’s momentum so that now it serves them.
When we try so desperately to eliminate external forces from entering and affecting our lives, we’re taking not only the route filled with futile resistance, but also the one that’s devoid of the potential to achieve the magnitude of character that lies within.
When everything that’s living is fundamentally a wave, why do we expect our lives to develop as a straight and certain line? Or worse, why do we shame ourselves when it doesn’t?
Haven’t our strongest traits, our greatest skills, and the wisdom we now have, all been forged under the pressure of various forces that entered our lives and brought something new with them?
Maybe our days could become more peaceful if we’d learn how to stop trying to turn our lives into some picture-perfect, vacuum-filled days. Maybe we’d benefit more not from focusing and controlling what goes on the outside, but learning how to quiet down that voice that says the exchange of tides and seasons of our lives equals failure, and remind ourselves how it’s nothing more than a sign of being alive.
Maybe we become masters of our lives not when we establish the absence of incoming forces, but when we learn how to embrace and work with them. When it becomes a practice to learn from them, knowing how they don’t take away but add strength and depth to our lives.
Establishing a tradition of channeling our pain, heartache, grief, and sorrow into a beautiful and dynamic work of life.
Acceptance, rather than rejection.
Alchemy, instead of suppression.
Albert Camus said these words in his speech, titled Create Dangerously:
“One may long, as I do, for a gentler flame, a respite, a pause for musing. But perhaps there is no other peace for the artist than what he finds in the heat of combat. ‘Every wall is a door,’ Emerson correctly said. Let us not look for the door, and the way out, anywhere but in the wall against which we are living. Instead, let us seek the respite where it is – in the very thick of the battle. For in my opinion, it is there. Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundations of his own sufferings and joys, builds for all.”
What if there’s more to who you are than what you’ve known and believed so far?
What if those misfortunes are nothing but fertile ground to help you grow into the magnitude you were meant to reach?
What if our struggles are our greatest gifts –
doors that lead to levels of humbleness, kindness, presence, perceptiveness, and grace that weave our character and offer depth of life far greater than what we ever hoped for?
