Day 22: The Strenuous Life
When was the last time you pushed yourself? Felt your heart pound out of your chest? Sweat through your shirt? Did something that you really didn’t want to do to make yourself better (your job doesn’t count)?
Teddy Roosevelt believed in “the strenuous life.” For him, this meant hard work, pushing the body to its limits and “living on the aggressive muscular, energetic side of life.” He worried that his generation of men was growing soft. If Teddy believed that HIS generation, forerunners to those who fought and died worldwide wars were growing soft and delicate— what on earth would he say about our device-addicted population?
Teddy was a frail kid though. He suffered from asthma and a body that couldn’t keep up with his mind and passion for life. His dad tried everything to help him out, using all kinds of fad treatments and therapies of the day, but when they didn’t work, he sat him down and said:
Theodore, you have the mind, but you have not the body, and without the help of the body, the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one’s body, but I know you will do it.
And Teddy said he would.
And then he did.
But he didn’t do it in 30 Days. It took him years. 30 Days is just a starting point, a foundation, a launch pad for a life of action.
In Day 21, I talked about how muscles and a killer physique isn’t everything, and it’s not. But at the same time, as Mansfield says in his chapter on the virtue/character trait of Wildness, physicality or the strenuous life is part of what makes us men:
[A]ll men need what Roosevelt found — a strenuous physical life, the possibility of harm, challenges to face, enemies to oppose, land to conquer. Our lives push us away from this. We work in cubicles or comfortable vehicles. Technology serves us and keeps us from exertion. We live in an opulent blandness — overfed, overextended, over entertained, and overly preoccupied with ourselves.
But men need aggressive physical lives. They need contest and conquest, strain and struggle. Otherwise we lose ourselves to softness and effeminacy. It is not much of a surprise that a New Testament word that is translated “effeminate” from the original Greek actually means “soft through luxury.” It is a warning . . .
We’ve all been given a body. It’s ours to take care of just like other things we’ve been entrusted with. We’ve also all been given youth, whether you still have it is another question, but habits that we build while are bodies are young are more likely to be carried into old age. We can’t let ourselves grow soft and old while we still have the strength and vigor to do something about it. We wont always have that energy, don’t waste it, don’t take it for granted. We only get one life, there are no do-overs.
We are not disembodied spirits. We are souls sealed into bodies. We need to work the machinery, be alive in both body and soul. It will awaken the masculinity in us. It will help us to untangle our inner knots. It will remind us that we are men. Perhaps the women and children in our lives are waiting for this, waiting for us to recover ourselves. This alone would be worth the battle.
People are counting on you. Whether you’re married, or engaged, or even single, someone out there is waiting for you to become the man that you were born to be. My wife waited a long time for me to start moving in the direction of becoming that man, God love her. It took me a while, and there have been fits and starts, and I’m sure there will be more to come. But I can’t waste any more time.
Can you?
Until tomorrow…
___________________________________________________________________
Quote of the Day
He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars.
~Jack London, Call of the Wild
___________________________________________________________________
Note: If you haven’t noticed already, I borrow very heavily from Mansfield’s Book of Manly Men. That is not to appropriate the author’s work, but to spur you to take a deeper look at the book, which for me, has been transformational. I want to make sure that it is abundantly clear that Stephen Mansfield deserves a great deal of credit for my words and has been one of the key inspirational sources of my story. Buy the book — trust me.
Additional source: Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough.
___________________________________________________________________
Links to Past Episodes/Resources:
Introduction Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5 Day 6 Day 7 Day 8 Day 9 Day 10
Day 11 Day 12 Day 13 Day 14 Day 15 Day 16 Day 17 Day 18 Day 19 Day 20
Manfield’s Book of Manly Men: An Utterly Invigorating Guide to Being Your Most Masculine Self
If you have any feedback, please send me a message or leave it on my Facebook page: Thirty Days. This is a new project and I’d love to hear your thoughts. It is a tremendous encouragement to know that someone is reading this. Encouragement, comments AND criticism are welcome.
