"The Man in the Arena"

     When I attended high school my wallet contained an abridged version of this quote scrawled on a piece of paper. It provided inspiration when I suffered from teenage angst and bucked me up without fail. Glad I now have the whole quote. Then I simply knew it as something President Theodore Roosevelt once said. We had no Internet to provide context and elaboration. I simply had seen it in a book, felt strongly about it, and wrote it on the nearest notepad.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

      My cross country and track coach in high school, Larry Coyle, paraphrased it simply as "dare to be good." He left us with those words before he went on sabbatical. He never coached us seniors in person again but to this day we say those words to each when we chance to meet at a reunion or even on the street. We may not have anything else in common now except those words and the feelings they contain. They just leave our mouths with such joy that all other circumstances don't really matter. These fleeting conversations never seem trite and always make us feel better for having had them. Not too much in life can be said to have such power.

     The original piece of paper with Teddy Roosevelt's words on it has long been replaced with all sorts of bank cards and IDs. Though I'm glad that I still have the memory of how I once coped with the world. It's reassuring in the current moment where we are all grasping at straws and trying to figure out our the new reality produced by the pandemic.

     Now we all have to consider how we might: "Dare greatly. Know victory. Know defeat."Scary idea I realize but more important than ever. We've been given a chance to reconsider how we value ourselves and those around us. The old adages about ever greater productivity being the measure of a person's worth don't seem too important today. I'm ever hopeful that we will follow the better angels of our nature.