Paradoxes of Strength

by Lucy S.

I was driving to work out with a trainer late one morning last week and got to thinking about what it means to be strong. Am I strong because I decided to call this trainer? (She runs a small facility that focuses on weight-training with the goal being to get the person fully able to do the workouts at home rather than permanently relying on a trainer.)  I thought five sessions with her would be enough to get me set for doing my workouts with the right form at home, but I can tell now that I will probably need to go with ten workouts with her to really have it all down properly and have the form right.

Ten workouts; is this me doing what I need to do to care for myself and get physically stronger, or is it weak self-indulgence to pay someone to work with me like that, and to work out with weights rather than just working hard enough in my garden and doing other things?  My income isn't high, and yet if I were as low-income as I used to be, I would never in a million years be able to afford this.  And is this guilt that I'm feeling, and if it is guilt, is it weakness? Or is writing about the guilt a way of actually defusing it, and is THAT weakness or is it strength (or neither, really)?

Recently, I realized that at some point years ago, I had inadvertently stopped doing some of the exercises properly that I'd learned from another trainer at that facility years ago. My form was wrong, so they weren't working what they were supposed to be working as well as they should have been, and I was also more likely to cause some injuries in myself.

There has long been a part of me that insisted on something being done or made well - or not insisting, exactly, but trying hard for that aim and being moved when I find others making their own tremendous efforts to do something as superbly as they can. Yet I believe in relishing life - or maybe no "yet" belongs at the front of this sentence, as if we have to choose between meaningful, challenging work and embracing pleasure.

My son Kevin reminds me sometimes that the great IWW labor organizer Big Bill Haywood used to say, "Nothing's too good for the working class."  He said this because he and his fellow organizers sometimes bought good liquor and good food.  (I'm out on a limb with this, because I don't have a citation, and I need to verify this, but at any rate, this is what Kevin says.)  I almost never drink liquor because I don't feel too good when I do (though I miss good margaritas on the rocks with lots of salt around the edges, and once in a great while will split one with someone - maybe twice a year - and maybe twice a year will have a beer).  Is this strength or weak selfishness?  It gets confusing at times to think it through.

I know I don't like puritanical asceticism. I detest that feeling I get from some people that everything enjoyable is wrong, and that we are supposed to compete for degrees of misery - that we will somehow find our way to more purity or have more legitimacy in our struggle against capitalism and imperialism and sexism and all the other mean dominating exploitations of the many by the fewer if we suffer more. And none of the poor or working-class people I've been close to over the course of my life compete for misery, either. Is this healthy, life-loving vigor in us?  Or are our desires too constructed by what advertisers and mass-culture instills in us? Are we strong or weak?

At the same time, I get impatient with people who can't deal with any interruptions to the steady stream of bland comfort in their lives. I remember one time visiting my old boss and his wife about nine years after I'd stopped working for him (a one time visit), and I did the driving into downtown Atlanta (they lived on the outskirts), because I had the minivan (and he had the Porsche he'd just bought himself for his 40th birthday). It was a warm day for April, and the air conditioner started to stop working just then.  Not a big problem with the windows rolled down, but he was soon uncomfortable and outspoken in his irritation. He said to his wife, "This is everything I'm opposed to. I hate this experience."  I wanted to roll my eyes and tell him to shut up and stop acting like a spoiled idiot, and that he should be embarrassed for himself, but of course I didn't say that, and I don't think anyone has ever said anything like that to him in his adult life.  When I worked for him back in the day, he was always preaching about work ethic to me, and he was sure, or at least pretended to be so sure, that he was strong.  And I suppose in his mind, people who have to drive around in minivans with failing air conditioners are weak, because if they were strong (his kind of strength), they'd have plenty of money and wouldn't have low life vehicles like that.  Whereas for me, someone like him is weak, because they can't handle hardships in life, even pretty mild ones like riding in a vehicle without air conditioning on a nice warm, but not hot, day, after eating a good breakfast and sleeping in his 4000 plus square foot home.

I think about strength, too, with regard to my own living situation over the years.  Was it strength to try at various times to make my marriage "work" (probably a useless term in itself, I think - "work" in this context)?  Or was it weakness that I didn't end it in the first couple of years when I realized that there were some huge gaps in our communication?  Or to not fully end it five or ten or more years ago? Or for that matter, is it strength that I never really go into much detail about what specifically went wrong years back or went wrong in other ways about ten years ago or went wrong in other ways in 2007 or at various other points?  Is being brutally honest strength?  And how do you keep that from slipping into the dishonesty of self-justification? Or on the other hand, from slipping into putting yourself down?  How do you not only write the truth but have the strength of judgment to know which truths should be told and which should be left unsaid?

This makes me think about my lifelong friend, Gloria, and how when she left her spouse, she tried to avoid explaining herself to people as a way to justify herself. She said she didn't care to run him into the mud to make herself look good. This is not to say she kept a stoic silence. She sometimes shared something that had driven her crazy, but not in answer to people who wanted explanations.  (Well... maybe in answer to a close family member or two, but only to point them to what they already knew.) And because of that, she and her former spouse remain on good terms, and treat one another as family. I respect the way she handled it. This to me was strength on her part.

I remember one time another friend wrote to me that I do not have to explain myself to anyone, unless I really want to. And for some reason, those words gave me strength.

For other people I'm close to, breaking the silence has been strength. Sometimes this has been to contribute to a broader knowledge about abuse, but it isn't possible to disentangle this from standing up for oneself and divesting some people from their ignorant assumptions.

I think about strength also in connection with my intellectual efforts.  Was it strong of me to go back to school in 2009 and finally finish the BA and then go on, when the opportunity was there, to get the MA?  Or was it weak thinking and self-indulgence, because English literature is not exactly the most lucrative field for many people with graduate degrees?  (And especially for me, at this point, and with "only" a master's degree.) And if I were really intellectually strong, would I not apply to PhD programs?  Or is it strong that I want to stay bound to places and people, and that I demand (if to no avail right now) that we should all have the right to keep growing intellectually wherever we are - and that I proclaim that education is not a scarce resource to be hoarded by a few?  Am I strong to behave or not behave according to the logic of academia or am I weak in behaving according to some other logic?  Am I weak to not force myself to move away from everyone I know, whether I feel heartbroken at that thought or not? Or is that itself - that I would be bereft to leave everyone and my home - is that feeling the proof of weakness?  Is it strength to not love anyone or any place too much, or is fierce, tenacious, gentle love a strength?

What does strength mean, and when do we need it, and what should we use it for?  I tend to slip back into the morality of what I was raised to believe - or at least the remaining residuals which feel true: the call to love others as we love ourselves.  Is this strength?  Is this possible?  Do these words mean something, or have they just worn such a groove into my psyche that I think and feel that they mean something?

If I loved others as I love myself, would I have paid this trainer for five sessions to get me into better shape and set me on a course to continue working out?  (And I will probably pay for five more.)  Maybe the problem is in personalizing the systemic. I want systemic change, and a decision to go or to not go to the trainer doesn't somehow become a push for systemic change. But this is not absolution, nor is it an answer to questions of strength or weakness.

So much seems to burst beyond the binaries of strength and weakness. Yet I am so moved by the many forms of strength I see in the people I love or in people whose work and struggles I respect and value. My strong friend Jiji is moving yet again in a few days - off to a whole new continent to embark on a PhD program where she knows no one at all, always missing loved ones who are almost always far away. And she loves them every bit as much as I love those here who I don't want to move away from, but her choices are constrained, so she does what she needs to do.  Her strength amazes me, and at the same time, I yearn for a world in which she didn't have to be quite that strong in that way - a world in which more of us were collectively strong enough to make our societies far less cruel and far more nurturing.