Read This First – Part I: The Strenuous Life
I was on the phone the other day with a pal of mine, the father of my God son, when he expressed his desire to have 3 virtues that guide his life that he can pass on to his now two sons. He’d just finished reading Clouds of Glory, a wonderful book about Robert E Lee, and he expressed a desire to have the same steadfast character of the great general, a man respected without equal by both sides of the war.
We essentially go through life in these times without much thought about our principles. We don’t write them down, they aren’t part of our mantra as men, and as a result we have no compass to guide us. We want to be good, but have no rules set to help us be good every day. We expect goodness to happen by the time we kick the bucket and so long as we don’t viciously hurt anyone we deem our lives “good”. How pitiful. How weak. The bar that measures our goodness, greatness, value of men is so low that any man who doesn’t hurt another human can be deemed good. Men like Robert E Lee or Lincoln or Theodore Roosevelt had a much higher bar and much stricter virtues.
Ben Franklin, at the age of 20, mapped out his rules for living a flourishing life. Though, in his words, he never did attain perfection, that was his quest. His quest was not to accomplish a single thing or to help start a nation or discover electricity. His quest was to be the best man that he could become, and the only way he thought this at all possible was to practice 13 virtues, to perfect them, to make them innate.
Today we forgo virtues for attributes. We want physical strength or aesthetics. We want things, be they money or the stuff we can buy with money. We want popularity, which is always a foolish goal as it’s dependent on the approval of others. What we don’t aim for, though, are the virtues that men throughout history have studied and applied and personified. Virtues are what make everything we’ve talked about thus far possible. Without virtues, that develop a man’s character, there is no grand moment where you man up or realize the fruits of your many arduous labors. Virtues are your moral spine and without a back-bone you will crack under the pressure that life, God, the universe – whatever name you put to it – or just time will inevitably place upon all of our shoulders.
The incredible thing is, that like my friend and I, we want something to stand on, to fall back on, and to keep us upright. We search for values, virtues, attributes to sustain us when the shit hits the fan. There’s a yearning for stability. It’s what it is to man up; it’s the footing from which we propel to new heights. It’s the strong foundation we seek, and without we build our houses on sand. We all want a strong base or foundation, but few coin this foundation as virtue, and even fewer seek the right ones out for them and schedule them into their lives. We don’t identify them, and if we do identify them, we don’t write them down and we definitely don’t make them habit. They remain thoughts, wishes, and fail to become habits.
About The Author
Chad Howse: Chad’s mission is to get you in the arena, ‘marred by the dust and sweat and blood’, to help you set and achieve audacious goals in the face of fear, and not only build your ideal body, but the life you were meant to live.
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