Why it Takes More Strength to Be Weak Than to Be Strong

The people we should consider heroes are the weak ones who just keep going.  After all, they’re the ones who don’t have a supportive audience calling their names from the rafters, egging them on to victory.  They’re the ones who don’t have a shiny, bright identity tailor-fit to their shape and studded with the admiration for those around them.  The strong don’t have to look deep inside to know who they are.  They define themselves in inches, the number of inches between them and second place.  Their name is written in trophies and broken records and from come-from-behind-to-win-it-all stories.  The world spells it out for them.

 It’s hard to be strong.  It means that you have to push your muscles harder and more frequently than the next guy.  It means worrying that everything you’ve done will crumble to powder with the next attempt at excellence.

But what does that compare to the plight of the weak?  The person who does their very best but still doesn’t make the cut?  Or even worse – the one who worked hard but who knows deep inside that they could have been something more?  It’s hard to live in a sea of failure.  It’s hard not to accept being less than the best.

Especially when you used to be.

Chris Bosh, a onetime NBA star who had to quit the league early for health reasons, put his struggle to live without his strength this way:

"You lose a sense of purpose, you lose a sense of yourself. And you lose confidence. You find yourself saying, 'I was the best at this and now I'm not the best.' You have to deal with not being very good."

It's hard to be a good basketball player.  It takes time, training, and dedication.  But it's even harder to do all of that and then not be one.

This year's men's college hoops tournament paints the picture clearer.  Read the following quote from the coach of the only top seeded team ever to lose to a 16 seed in the first round and tell me they had it easier than the highly ranked Villanova squad that sauntered their way to the championship trophy.

"You'll remember this. It will sting. Maybe a 1 seed will get beat again, maybe not. Maybe we'll be the only No. 1 seed to ever lose. It's life. It goes on. We'll have to get past that...But a life lesson is sitting there about defining yourself by maybe not what the world says, but there's other things that matter..."

The world says that Virginia failed epically and that works well--for everyone but Virginia.  Because they're the ones who will have to live with who they are and what they didn't accomplish in the tournament.  And only they know the pain of expecting to be the best and then not being it.  Don't get me wrong, winning at the Big Dance is no mean feat, but it pales in comparison to losing.  And, sports fans or not, that's something we should all care about.

Because we're all going to lose at one time or another.  If not at basketball than at school, love, parenting, finance, or something completely different.  It isn't the fact that we're weak that defines us.  We all are.  What defines us is what we choose to do about it.

 So what can we do about it?

Well first, and probably hardest, we can accept the fact that we're weak.  Rather than running from it, embrace it.  That may seem impossible at first because weakness just DOESN'T feel acceptable.  But there is no universal law out there that says we have to act the way we feel.

We can smile when we feel sad.

We can forgive when we're angry.

We can go on a run when we just want to lie around in bed.

And we can take the first step to reaching our dreams even when they seem infinitely far away.

After all, past failures aren't just going to disappear.  If anything's going to change, we're the ones that will have to move. 

Life is what we make it and life is how we choose it.  Which is ironic because being weak isn't necessarily a decision.  Yet transcending both weakness and strength altogether is the only place where true strength lies, because it is the only space in which our talent or lack thereof can no longer chain us to our environment.  It is the only place we can truly be free.

Then, in that place, we can choose to step into the future, leaning on what is stronger than us without hating ourselves for it.  We can move forward in our lives even when it's us that's holding us back.  We can rise to the top without moving an inch.

And any of us, any of us, can be great.

Because strength doesn’t define accomplishment.

Accomplishment is choosing to engage in the fight for excellence no matter where we're currently at.

And that, my friends, is truly strong.

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Photo attribution: David Rain. "Storm Colorado Springs Colorado, " https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode AJC1, "Wave," https://creativecommons.orglicensesby-sa2.0legalcode jessicaraniess "fruit splash," https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode