Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life by Eric Greitens

Author:Eric Greitens [Greitens, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, azw
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2015-03-10T04:00:00+00:00

—9—

When I was in high school, I remember my English teacher Barbara Osburg telling me a story about a young couple. I can’t remember if it was a true story about people she knew or a story about people she had read about in a book, but her mind was always full of wisdom gained from both, and I don’t know that it makes much difference. Here’s the story:

A young mother is holding a baby in her arms. At the same time, she is trying to cook dinner. Dinner is about to burn. Just as she needs to grab the pot from the stove, the phone begins to ring.

Meanwhile, her husband is upstairs writing. She calls to him for help, and he murmurs something about his writing. She walks upstairs and stands in the doorway of the room where he is typing. He does not look up. She gets his attention by saying, “I need you to listen to me,” and asks, “If there were a fire right now, would you run through the house to save me and the baby?”

He says, “Yes, of course.”

She replies, “There’s never going to be a fire.”

We talked about this before, Walker. People want to imagine that somehow, when “the moment” comes, they will be heroes. But there are rarely such moments in anyone’s life, and when they do come, they last for mere minutes. What usually matters in your life is not the magical moment, but the quality of your daily practice. As the novelist Anthony Trollope wrote, “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”

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