April 13 - II

II 

Good morning everyone. Today I want to talk about a piece of writing that is pretty widely publicised, and that is Theodore Roosevelt’s Man in the Arena. What is not as widely known is that the excerpt people often refer back to is just a piece of a much larger speech given by Mr. Roosevelt entitled, “Citizenship in a Republic.” For the sake of this entry however, I would like to focus on the passage that a majority of us are familiar with. For those that are not I have included it below: 

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

In many ways Teddy Roosevelt’s words serve as affirmation in both trying and easy times. It reinforces the idea that the feeling of uneasiness, or fear, or giddy anticipation is not in any way negative, but confirmation that we are fully alive, chasing, striving, and sometimes even falling in the right direction. The notion that success in itself is not what we are chasing is in a lot of ways freeing. What we are after is the journey. The journey towards achieving something substantive, and the success, regardless of the outcome, is the person that you become along the way. 

This is a subject that I have put a fair amount of thought into lately. That is that you cannot conquer certain levels of achievement, until you become the type of person worthy of doing so. I don’t know if that ties into any particular religious beliefs anyone may have; but on a human level,  dumb luck excluded , I do believe that the most important work one does is on themselves. If you cannot do the work each and every day to become the upstanding, courageous, and generous man you are meant to be, then the success that dovetails with that is equally unlikely to accompany you. In order to attain the ultimate success, I have come to believe that it is on you to become the caliber of man that is equipped to handle, and is deversing of said achievement. 

How to go about that is still somewhat of a mystery to me, but I look forward to continuing to explore it.