Man is a multi-faceted creature. Too often we look at man, and many things in life, as a dichotomy. We see in black and white when there are shades of grey. Now with that being said often in life we see things in shades of grey that are black and white, but that’s a topic for another time. Man represents many things, we’ve talked a little about the different archetypes of man and how a true man, a renaissance man, a warrior poet, embraces all of these things.
A man is both strong and open, a man is both wise and daring, a man is both hard and soft depending on what is required for the situation. Too often men get stuck in a dichotomy and lose parts of themselves because they feel that they have to be a certain thing. For example maybe they feel they can’t have or show emotions because they see males expressing their emotions weakly or being controlled by them and then wrongly conclude that emotions are bad.
When what’s actually bad is being controlled by or a slave to them. Likewise you may have another male that thinks he doesn’t need strength because after all dad was strong but still failed as a father so therefore he just needs to be open and sensitive and doesn’t need anything of that old school strength stuff. But that’s also a falsity, man needs strength as surely as a flower needs water to flourish. So we end up in all of these weird configurations because we fail to understand that man is a multi-faceted being.
We’re like people that cut off either their left and right arm or leg because we fell that we should be for one or the other, instead of having both and functioning properly. A man must be strong enough to kill yet open enough to love. And many other so called “opposites”, though on closer inspection we’ll soon find that these things aren’t opposites at all but rather naturally go hand in hand with one another.
Breaking The Limitations
I’ve spoken throughout this work about the importance of shoring up weaknesses and seeing where you need to focus on. Society and the modern world likes to put people in boxes and make sure that they stay there. They like to categorize and label people and unfortunately people often like to be categorized and label. And that’s because it’s much easier for someone else to tell you who and what you are instead of doing the hard word of thinking and finding out for yourself. There are all kinds of boxes that have little correlation to reality.
Introvert and extrovert, jock, and nerd, those dumb personality quizzes. A true man will be extroverted when he needs to be and introverted when he needs to be. He’ll embody the positive aspects of both nerd and jock while culling away the negative aspects. No dumb quiz is going to fully grasp his personality. And so on and so forth. The first thing you have to do is stop letting yourself be categorized by a convenient box.
You’re more than a number. Stop placing yourself in a box and let things grow organically. Seek balance and full, well rounded development. There is no box for that. I’m not saying boxes are never useful or that they can’t serve a purpose, they certainly can, and can be useful as tools. However you cannot allow yourself to be defined by them or defined by any label that society wants to put on you.
You need to define yourself and define yourself through your actions.
The Balance Of Man
There’s an old poem by Rudyard Kipling called If and if you’ve never read it I’d encourage you to go out and do so. In it he talks about the dichotomy of man to an extent. Talks about you should feel at easy walking with prices and beggars alike. So much of that attitude, of that understanding, is lost in the modern world. The modern world where everyone is supposed to be reduced to numbers. Humans are seen as essentially ill-functioning robots.
That’s not what man is. Man is many things that are hard to define but one simple term. The first step to developing oneself fully and becoming the warrior poet, the true man, is to realize that man is many things, a balance in many ways, but a balance driven to the max. I don’t mean balance as in man is sort of strong and sort of wise and sort of this good thing and sort of that good thing. I mean he’s very strong, very wise, very this good thing, and very that good thing.
Balance doesn’t mean not developing things to their upmost, don’t mistake balance for some sort of timid middle ground, that’s not what I mean. It’s unfortunate but essentially every word in the modern world has some sort of ready made corruption to kill its power and meaning. Say strength and people think brutality, say wisdom and people think bearded useless man who hides on mountain top and doesn’t engage with the world, say balance and people think meek compromise, and so on and so forth.
Ironically you need wisdom to decipher what the true meaning of words are and when you decipher the true meaning that’s when they have their true power. The modern world doesn’t corrupt language by accident, it knows the power of such things. By balance I mean developing all the goods things to their upmost. Strength, wisdom, character, and so on and so forth. Seek balance and development.
How To Develop All Aspects Of Yourself As A Man
How do we embody all of these things? These things that to the average individual would seem like opposites at first? But again upon further study turn out to be symbiotic? We’ve talked about a lot of it. Work to develop yourself physically, mentally, and spiritually. Work to develop wisdom, strength, character, and willpower. Work to create beauty in everything that you do. Work for what you see as good and have backbone to call out error and rottenness when you see it for what it is.
Work on the skills we talked about. The different aspects of development. Learn to fight, to sing, to hunt, to read, to write, to sell, to persuade, to be silent, to be healthy, and a million other things. Remember always be learning. That is the way to full development and to balance, that is the way to become and embody the warrior poet and all he represents. To not be stunted in one area of life, to have no obvious weaknesses. To address all areas and be open to discovering more weaknesses that you can address on your journey.
This doesn’t mean be obsessed about it, of course. This just means by open and do what needs to be done when it needs to be done, as simply as that. Seek to become well-rounded, to make your strengths even stronger and shore up your weaknesses. Like if you had a castle that was going to be under siege. You would work diligently to shore up any weakness while making the most of your strengths as well. You will seek out challenges, whatever they may be.
For one man hunting may be a huge challenge, for another public speaking, for another writing poetry. That’s something else you should be doing. Find what’s hard and do that. Find where you get the most resistance and go and conquer that. That’s where the most growth occurs. There’s an old, cheesy, but true saying that states you’ll never reach the end zone if you stay in your comfort zone.
For those unaware the end zone is where you score in American football but I think you get what I’m getting at.
We’re seeking full development, seek discomfort, seek challenge, seek the things that are hard to do, and that’s how you’ll forge yourself into a fully developed man, a warrior poet, a man that’s strong enough to kill and open enough to love. A man in full as Kipling would say.
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-Charles Sledge
