The Price of Greatness
"The Price of Greatness"
Ira Progoff says historically, culturally, he can prove that the only people who really achieved any greatness have been people who have agreed to live with a certain degree of stress in their lives. Now we have made stress somewhat of a bad word in recent years. We have stress workshops, and we all know you go to a certain point and stress isn’t good. But in fact, lack of stress isn’t good either. Our culture allows us constantly to coddle ourselves. We’re always getting away from one thing or another because we need to relax. The price we may pay for that is greatness. Masculinity seems instinctively to sense this need for a certain hardness, obstruction and necessary stress. You see it in men’s myths, their sports, their attitude toward childrearing. It’s half of the truth, although largely rejected by contemporary liberal thinking. Masculinity senses that criticism, trial and non-affirmation are also a way of testing the mettle and thus affirming the one tested. Masculine human nature needs to have a certain goad, an irritant that it’s butting itself up against to fashion a creative tension. There is a direct correlation between the degree of imagination and the degree of creative stress in someone’s life. We now have a positive word for this experience: eustress. The peace of God is not the comfortable avoidance of all stress. True peace has room enough for all kinds of difficulties.
from A Man’s Approach to God by Richard Rohr
Ira Progoff says historically, culturally, he can prove that the only people who really achieved any greatness have been people who have agreed to live with a certain degree of stress in their lives. Now we have made stress somewhat of a bad word in recent years. We have stress workshops, and we all know you go to a certain point and stress isn’t good. But in fact, lack of stress isn’t good either. Our culture allows us constantly to coddle ourselves. We’re always getting away from one thing or another because we need to relax. The price we may pay for that is greatness. Masculinity seems instinctively to sense this need for a certain hardness, obstruction and necessary stress. You see it in men’s myths, their sports, their attitude toward childrearing. It’s half of the truth, although largely rejected by contemporary liberal thinking. Masculinity senses that criticism, trial and non-affirmation are also a way of testing the mettle and thus affirming the one tested. Masculine human nature needs to have a certain goad, an irritant that it’s butting itself up against to fashion a creative tension. There is a direct correlation between the degree of imagination and the degree of creative stress in someone’s life. We now have a positive word for this experience: eustress. The peace of God is not the comfortable avoidance of all stress. True peace has room enough for all kinds of difficulties.
from A Man’s Approach to God by Richard Rohr
posted by LuisVelasco @ 7:02 AM
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