ISBC 41 - In Praise of Slow and Sloppy
ISBC 41 - In Praise of Slow and Sloppy
Chapter 41 of Hope: A User's Manual
And if the Herndon climb is truly a learning exercise, then a group that takes a long time to finish is going to gain more useful wisdom than groups who fall immediately into a strategy that works.
And the future may be brighter not despite a tough slog but because of it.1
Full disclosure, this photo is not the Herndon Monument at the United States Naval Academy. But it is about the same height (about 21’ tall) and it is an obelisk. This one, however, is at Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati, Ohio. Also, full disclosure, I have never served in the military and did not attend the Naval Academy and so I have absolutely no first hand experience of the event that MaryAnn writes about in this chapter.
I do, however, have a brother-in-law who did attend the Naval Academy and then went into the Marines. In thinking about this reflection, I gave a call to him to ask about his experience of it. It had been decades since he’d done it and there’s a chance that it was such a miserable experience that he had repressed some memories of it. But he did share what he remembered of it. He described the monument as not only being wet down with water and soap but also with lard and grease. He shared about how blazing hot it was that day and that the way they eventually made it up was to keep wiping off sections of it (water, soap, and lard), and making row after row of human steps to get someone close enough to reach the top and replace the “dixie-cup hat” with an upperclassman’s combination cover. I just read the wikipedia page about it and some classes finished it in just a few minutes while some others took 3 and 4 hours to do it.
As my brother-in-law described this, I was imagining the ground under all these men and women soaked in water, lard, soap, and sweat. I was thinking about how miserable it must have been for the ones at the bottom of this pile of humanity in the stifling heat as well as how miserable it must have been for all of them. I also imagined the relief that must have been felt when the caps were replaced and the task completed. Wow.
You know...there’s absolutely no way that one could fully be a part of this task without getting absolutely and completely messy and putting themselves fully into the work. No way at all. And if someone got to the end and they were clean and dry, it meant they weren’t in the middle of it at all.
As I’m writing this, I’m going to the quote from Teddy Roosevelt that has been recently popularized by Brene Brown. Here’s the quote:
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 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.
This is the quote with which Brown starts out her book, Daring Greatly, and guides the rest of this amazing read. I have put a link at the end to a segment of a talk she gave on this as well. Both that message and her book connect this quote to the practice of vulnerability, of letting others in and letting yourself out, of taking chances that something will succeed or fail or somewhere in between, of being willing to (in Brene’s words) “get your ass kicked” as well as to be lifted up and blessed. All of it. But not being on the sidelines away from the mess of trying to move forward.
I don’t want to imagine the vulnerability of being in the middle of that monument climb. Soaked, sticky, smelling, in close quarters with others who are soaked, sticky, and smelling. Yet, that’s what has to be done.
But what’s the connection between vulnerability and hope? After all, this chapter and this book and these reflections are centered on hope. Well, there’s a quote that I cannot find right now that sounds a lot like what Teddy Roosevelt said - something about how hope is that which has dirt under its fingernails and scratches from hard work and that gets knocked down and stands back up and says, “I can do this all day. Maybe the connection here is that hope arises out of those kinds of moments of vulnerability, that we can rise again that we can get through the muck and mud, that we can make it through times like this with integrity and honor, that we can try and fail and try and succeed.
Maybe there’s a connection in my own life in how I have grown in my willingness and ability to be vulnerable that I have also grown in my ability to embrace hope. Honestly, it is far from easy for me to be vulnerable. As pretty much everyone in my life can attest, I’m a tough book to open and to read. It is far more comfortable for me to watch from the sidelines and see things happen. But I am grateful for growth that has led me to a greater willingness to jump in, to get messy, to get vulnerable, and to be a part of the bigger work of hope in the world. I’m not there fully yet and probably never will be. But hope arisen as I have tried to put myself out more and more of getting into the middle of the mess and the muck and seeing that something is possible...
Grace, Peace, Love, and Joy,
Ed
McKibben Dana, MaryAnn. Hope: A User's Manual (p. 172). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.