Abdication is No Honorable Option

"There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven...a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to speak and a time to remain silent." -King Solomon, Book of Ecclesiastes

"If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you...If you can wait and not be tired by waiting...If you can see the things you've given your life to broken, and stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools...If you can make one heap of all your winnings, and risk it on one turn of pitch and toss, and lose and start again at your beginnings, and never breath a word about your loss." -Rudyard Kipling, If

"Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, for love covers a multitude of sins." -The Apostle Peter, First Epistle

There are many people who are what we would call "Golden Agers," who think that if we were magically transported back in time, to some past era, we would see society in a much better condition than we see our own. These nostalgic dreamers make euphemistic claims about how wonderful life was in the "good 'ol days." There were no good 'ol days, only the same days as today from which we extracted the good parts for posterity's sake. History, like the news, tends to focus on the negatives: wars, crises, revolutions, famines, plagues, tyrannies, etc. Memory, like poetry, tends to focus on the positives: morality, great art, music, literature, architecture, order & peace, etc. Kipling speaks of "triumph and disaster" as "imposters," and so I think of history and memory.

With all of that being said, I wouldn't dare to claim that society has come to the point where things like commitment and perseverence no longer matter, a degeneration into some ethical slum. Nay, we have perpetually lived in such an ethical slum, as the human race has been perpetually human. The conservatives speak of the devolution of humanity, the liberals speak of its evolution. I would like to speak of its constancy.

One of the constants of humanity is our unwillingness to endure hardships. It is often easier to give up than to fight. It is easier to break a commitment than to keep it. I am tempted by this daily, on so many different fronts of my life. The easy route is so appealing, but it is a spurious appeal. The easy route is that mirage in the desert that parades itself as an oasis, but it is empty and full of disappointment. The easy route, I would say, is like Chesterton's "little place at Whatsitsname," the home of the Devil, of which he says this...

"At the little place at Whatsitsname, where folks are rich and clever,
The golden and the goodly house, where things grow worse forever.
There are things you need not know of, though you live and die in vain,
There are souls more sick of pleasure, than you are sick of pain,
There's a game of April Fool that's played behind it's door,
Where the fool remains forever, and April comes no more.
Where the splendour of the daylight grows drearier than the dark,
And life droops like a vulture that once was such a lark,
And that is the Blue Devil, that once was the Blue Bird,
For the Devil is a gentleman, and doesn't keep his word."

I find that when put properly in its perspective, abdication is not only no honorable option, but it is no rational option at all. Abdication leads one to a circumstance Napoleon decried so appropriately: "Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily." The man who abdicates his duties, breaks his commitments, and flees from difficulty lives defeated, for quitting is the most hideous form of defeat, for it is a defeat that one chooses to bring upon himself.

This is a pep talk I have had to have with myself lately, and thought I'd write it down for my own sake in the future, and for the sake of others experiencing fires and storms. There are few characteristics more lacking in human society than honesty about one's hardships. We love to play pretend, to say that everything is going wonderfully. The only time we let other people in on our problems is when we have that selfish desire for sympathy and reassurance. I think this is what St. Thomas Aquinas was referring to when he said in his Prayer for Ordering a Life Wisely "Oh Lord, my God, make me...humble without posturing." So I should pray for that hourly.

There is never a reason to abdicate; never a reason to quit; never a reason to surrender; never a reason to think that all is lost, for if one maintains his resolve, then by definition, all is not lost, for that one thing remains. The end of Kipling's poem summarizes the reward of the persevering and the wise "yours is the world, and all that's in it; but which is more, you'll be a man, my son."