Real Self-esteem and Where it Comes From/The Best Thing You Can Do in High School.

Well, it’s not Sunday, but I feel a homily coming on and that’s okay – I have long suspected that ministers often write their sermons on Saturday afternoons anyway.  And as long as I've opened with a religious reference, I’ll mention the Episcopal School of Dallas’s victory in the boys varsity quad at the Texas State Championships – a barnburner of a championship win over crosstown rival St. Mark’s, along with the rest of the field – four-tenths of a second, give or take – and well-done, gentlemen and Coach Naifeh.    Not that the sectarian affiliation makes the achievement even an iota more virtuous.  But that’s not the topic, the news was just the catalyst for the post, because it got me thinking about why high school is valuable, and which of the many experiences we have during that period of our lives are of great and lasting importance.  Too many high school upperclassmen are in far too big a hurry to get on with it and be done with high school because everyone knows that real life for the comfortably well-off among us starts during the September of our eighteenth year , when we go off to college and our parents aren’t nosing around any more, trying to keep us from staying up late, drinking too much and too often, and all the other stuff that’s ten times harder to plan while we’re in high school.  Umm – okay, so that’s not real life except to the mind of someone who has never had to pay all of his own bills, but it’s the growth of the adolescent mind into an adult mind that this post is eventually going to be about anyway.

So let’s stay on the task of exploring ill-formed attitudes and their pitfalls, and of moving in the direction of better mindsets and their desirability.  And since I’m not going to shy away from a homily today, let’s start with Christianity and its most common misuse.  The idea of forgiveness by a loving god seems to be what brings most people to Christianity.  We hear that we are promised forgiveness, and forgiveness, apparently, is easy: all you have to do is repent.  For the spiritually lazy person, the doctrine of Christianity becomes “I can do anything I want because I'm already forgiven.”  Try telling someone who’s attached to that idea that real Christianity is harder than that and you’ll most likely get a blank look and maybe the conversational equivalent of a chorus of "Jesus Loves Me."  Believing you're forgiven is easy;  actually loving god and neighbor is frustratingly hard.  And as a result, many if not most of us conveniently ignore the part that requires work and just choose to reside in a seductive but false notion of grace instead.  I promise that I’ll get back to high school in a minute – stay with me. 

Over the past thirty years or so, the self-esteem movement has become a quasi-religion unto itself.   A couple of generations of parents now have been suckered into a wrong-headed perversion of what is basically a good idea in much the same way that for a couple of millennia many if not most Christians have missed the real essence of Christianity because it’s just bloody hard to put into practice.   Those who can do it are rare and precious.  In the same way that “you are forgiven” becomes the mantra of the lazy Christian, “you are special” assumes that role for the lazy parent, teacher, and child, but here’s the catch: nobody but the most delusional Pollyanna really believes it, least of all the kid, and so we send too many people off to college ill-prepared to do much beyond taking a four-year desultory fling with their parents’ money, and they emerge four or more years later not all that much better educated than they'd have been in high school if they hadn't been slathered with empty "you are special" plaudits right up until graduation.  

 The truth is that real self-esteeem comes from learning to do a difficult thing well and then having tangible proof that you’ve done so.  And getting to that point in one or more pursuits is the most valuable thing that a young man or young woman can accomplish in high school.   And that’s what is so valuable about scholastic crew.  And the ESD varsity boys quad got a taste of that earlier today.  Again – well-done, fellas.  Take it with you and accomplish even bigger things down the road.  

Pecking Orders, or Limitations and the Belief in Belief Part 2

The previous post was mostly about the potentially ill effects that a coach's erroneous belief systems often have on athletes.  This one takes us back to the athletes themselves and how critically important the athlete's own beliefs are.  Central to this is the natural tendency of animals, including and even especially humans, to accept pecking orders.  As I write this I find myself working very hard to come up with any redeeming usefulness for pecking orders in athletics.  I almost had my mind around one (something to do with orderliness and anarchy, I think) but then it vanished and I was left with the conviction with which I began, which is that the acceptance of a pecking order by athletes is nothing but a voluntary acceptance of limitations.  A willful shackling of oneself to mediocrity.  You might as well tie a small anchor to your stern and drag it while racing.

We've all observed it before: an athlete says something like "Oh, I could never beat her - she's amazing."  I once heard one of the most fluid, graceful scullers I've ever seen say "Nobody's going to beat Michelle Guerette."  There were some unspoken qualifiers in the statement; she clearly meant no one in the United States this year and so forth, but even so, I bristled at the idea that this athlete had not only accepted her own place in the pecking order, but she had consigned EVERYONE to a place below Michelle Guerette.  And if you really believe that racing ought to be an absolutely pure expression of the highest abilities of everyone involved, when you get down to it there's an insult to Michelle implicit in the intended compliment to her greatness.  To place her at the top of a pecking order and assert that she cannot be defeated is to accept defeat before the race is even rowed.  I can't speak for Michelle or anyone else about whom someone has said "no one's going to beat her" but I can assert that I'd much rather race people who are truly gunning for me with the belief that they can, in fact, get there faster than I can than to race people who have already decided that outcome in advance.  Having overheard one of the rowers from our first novice eight say something like "I hope Miami catches a crab in the final," Will Scoggins saw pre-race anxiety for what it was and put it this way: "Bullshit.  You want a hollow victory?  You've got to want your opponent to row the best race of his life and still whip his ass."  We can debate the idea of whether racing is really about whipping anybody's ass, but it hits the core idea of what a race really ought to be.  Wanting anything but the best effort from those who oppose you is a subtle form of cowardice - accepting one's place in the pecking order while simultaneously desiring to have others see you as higher up in it than you actually are.  Scoggins had another particularly memorable way of describing the most noble way of racing.  It was "Just make the boat go fast all the way down the course, and when you're sure you're across the finish line, look up and see how you did."

I knew a guy in high school named John (okay, so everybody did - but not this one).  We were both on the wrestling team.  We had a 157 pound state champion, several conference champions, and quite a few kids who were just generally tough, hard-nosed wrestlers.  John had no such reputation.  As a freshman, he was a little doughy and never made much impression on anybody.  He was a warm body who could weigh in and take forfeits when the other team didn't have an athlete of the appropriate weight class or get pinned if they did.  He had come to wrestling late - most of the guys had wrestled in middle school or even elementary school.  John wasn't supposed to be good.  He was supposed to accept his place among the warm bodies in the pecking order.  John showed up as a sophomore about five pounds lighter and fit as hell and started giving the guys in the lighter weight classes on the team all they could handle.  He wound up being our 128 pound starter and winning quite a few matches, and in the process, guys went from saying things like "what's going on?  How did he lose to JOHN?" to being delighted that a young Atlas had picked up the earth and juggled with it for a little while.  And that's the mindset that we're talking about.

Maybe that's were I've been headed from the start of this post - to the idea that acceptance of one's supposed place in a pecking order is basically ignoble, and the will to defy, confound, or destroy the pecking order is not only admirable and praiseworthy but beneficial to the system.  Nothing produces complacency more reliably than the security of knowing that everyone thinks you can't be defeated.  Find the better angels of your nature.  Race with the curiosity of wondering how fast you can go rather than the certainty that you're not as fast as that "amazing" sculler you've deified.  And if you meet the Buddha on the race course, kill him.