Endurance

Boxing. It was Joyce Carol Oates’ infatuation with the metaphors permeating this bloodsport that finally nailed the coffin lid shut on my love of fiction, ironically in the last semester of my degree … in English. While I seldom read fiction anymore, I do watch it, and I recently watched an episode of one of my favorite sci-fi series, Voyager, in which boxing was the metaphor. This time it resonated, and I saw something besides animal violence and voyeuristic spectatorship. I saw, outside of the parasitic, monetized publicity of prize fights, a certain parallelism to the examined life.

What possible parallels could we find to this vile activity, we, in our civilized culture? It was suddenly clear what Oates was saying: we are in a ring, with gloves on, an opponent, and with any luck, a really good coach. Not just the most embattled of us, but all of us. That coach standing right outside the ring intones:

Stay off the ropes. It’s not about ducking punches, it’s about learning how to take them and keep going – letting your opponent tire punching you, keeping your elbows down, waiting for the best moment to launch your secret weapon, a well-practiced right jab. It’s about every minute of conditioning outside the ring that goes with you in there, being fit and knowing your strengths and weaknesses and going back into the ring anyway. It’s about proving to yourself that you’re single-minded, unswayed and unintimidated, that you have absolute integrity of mission. That you get up again until you’ve conquered.

It’s tempting to avoid sparring with life, playing it safe, never getting hurt, concentrating on taking out our opponent, forgetting that the apparent opponent is merely a sparring partner. The real opponent is within – our fears, our lack of consistency, our self-exposure, our giving up, our unwillingness to extend ourselves when the opportunity presents itself, our tendency to go into a clinch with life, holding it so that it can’t do any more damage. Our willingness to accept ourselves without proving ourselves.

Boxing, alone perhaps except wrestling in common sports, forces this sustained battle with a helpful external opponent. The point is not to overcome that opponent, but to use that opponent to overcome oneself. We do that by sparring with life, dancing, extending ourselves, taking a hit now and then, getting up every time, staying in the ring. The longer we’re there, faced with the profoundly watchful awareness a good fighter develops, the better we know ourselves, and like the instinctual response of a trained fighter, we are one – actions springing naturally from habits of previous action, our character molded around our training and unable to act at odds with what we know and do when we’re pressed by the external opponent.

The truly great fighters have absolute integrity with themselves. The ring with its sparring practice is the key to forcing us to examine … everything. What we bring to the ring, our talents and skills and resources – they are nothing if we don’t have the character, the oneness with our definition of ourselves, to endure. Like the talented fighters who succumbed to the apparent violence of the sport, we can be tempted to start fighting our opponents instead of examining ourselves. They lost their focus, and in so doing they were less than they could have been, and so could we be.

Stay in the ring. Stay off the ropes. Finish the fight. It’s a good, not a heartless coach who says those things from the darkness just outside the spotlight. I’m probably not going to go out and buy a pair of gloves or tickets to a fight, but I’m more likely to see the point of enduring my fights.

*Later, I stumbled on an essay which profoundly illustrated a few of my thoughts on the boxing metaphor. You might enjoy it as well.

 

Hard Days

Everyone has them. Yesterday afternoon I found myself sitting on the corner of my bed staring into the darkness, trying to feel something, anything. I let warm tears course down my cheeks as I finally surrendered to the lostness that has been creeping after me for a very long time, waiting for an easy moment. I don’t let myself do that often because bi-polar tendencies ensure that that can last far longer than is healthy. But after playing Pollyanna as long as one can, sometimes one is left with the dark room and the dark vapor of hopelessness.

One of my favorite books, To Him That Believeth, quotes a day like that as told by a woman who lived and worked a hundred years ago. Rather than tell my story, I’m going to tell hers, because it is so moving to me and  always pushes the hopelessness just far enough away to let me breathe and get my bearings. The whole talk in which she told this story is contained in her papers at the University of Utah, but you can read it here. Her words are so very inspirational for someone whose LDS faith is the center of her life. Perhaps it will resonate with you as it has with me.

 

The Parable of the Principals

Hand-fed Hummingbirds

The other day a friend, whose work life changed dramatically with a new boss along with the new year, sat across from me reborn, excited once again to be a teacher. She glowed and bounced as she talked about her day, laughed at the various trials of an overcrowded classroom, and grinned as I responded to her almost unrecognizable enthusiasm. “What happened to you?” I laughed incredulously.

She has always been dedicated, but I hadn’t seen enthusiasm for years. She would steel herself to return after vacations and the number of years until retirement always came up in a conversation. She didn’t complain or gossip or do less than her duty, she just didn’t like her job. Last December, in one of those cascading midyear promotions, the district shifted a number of administrative positions, and her former boss went elsewhere, bringing someone in who was being promoted from a smaller school. The result was obvious.

Teachers are unique employees. They are rather like the contracted self-employed. To use overworked business lingo, they are “self-motivated” – to the point of possessive of their little kingdoms. Administration least seen is often considered the best form. I asked her to compare and contrast the changes. The examples bubbled out of her.

 

The Adversary of My Soul

My nerves have been jangled most of the day. It’s fallout from a family conflict earlier, one of the things I detest more than anything else. My home is a haven and very often an extension of my inner environment, and infighting is like releasing a supervirus. I’ve long thought that harboring disdain and the tendency to call someone else a fool is one of the most destructive things we do to one another, masking our ability to be ourselves as surely as DNA-overwriting viruses hijack cells. Because I have a child who has for years gone to school to face the “mean girls” who say, “You’re so weird” in that uniquely teen-girl dismissal whenever she tries to be friendly, the momma bear is alive and well. Conflict has all kinds of fallout.

The melancholy persisted all day afterward, despite my greatest efforts to refocus.

While pondering on it this evening, the words suddenly entered my mind, “This was a distraction.” With them came the overflowing peace that I’ve lately had, despite deep concerns of many kinds. It is interesting that conflict proves so useful to inhibit all positive growth. The Adversary of my soul need only cause this little infection between people who love one another, and suddenly all is distrusted, the smooth flow of loving interchange is interrupted, and emotional and spiritual viruses multiply with wild abandon. All progress stops until the system finds balance again.

 

Misfits

Abraham Lincoln, source: constitutioncenter.org

We are a nation of underdogs. We champion the little guy, the small businessman, and the Horatio-Alger-couldn’t-win-but-does-with-grit types. It’s probably that scrapping history of people hewn as roughly from the wilderness as their log cabins were, chins turned up resolutely but glancing at the more elegant shores of Europe like a child with nose pressed against the glass.

Well, at least we used to be.

Somewhere along the way we grew prosperous and we changed, but not completely. We still think we are a nation that champions the underdog, though we want to make sure we pick the winning team and the winning candidate. We walk with chests thrown out when we talk about moral issues facing the world the way people with power talk. We bristle at the wealthy distrustfully, but we’re really more distrustful of the poor.

We’re in transition, straddling our future and our past.