“How are you?” Pausing, I thought, do I give a glossy answer? Do they really want to know? Is this a casual greeting or are we really going to have a conversation? How am I, really?

For those who occasionally get more answer than they really want, please forgive me. Conversation is a tricky thing. Where do we invest? How much do we invest? What’s happening in this moment? Am I really compulsively overthinking this right now?

I suppose we can get ourselves into Woody Allen moments, neurotically stuck in our own heads and seeing everything, and everyone, in our quirky complex, self-obsessive ways. Recently greeting some people I don’t see often, my “how are you?” elicited heavy sighs, some head shaking, and a Christmas Vacation moment in which I felt like Chevy Chase reacting to the litany of aches and pains from his parents and in-laws. A little later, I heard myself respond to a similar question with a slow exhale, “It’s a lot.” Followed with “heavy” and some other ramblings. Did I just say that?

In the years that my daughter and my son-in-law played and coached basketball at Hillsdale College, I always paused when visiting the arena to look at the college motto in big letters on the back of the stands: Virtus Tentamine Gaudet – Strength Rejoices in the Challenge. What a powerful motto and a great rallying cry. The kind of thing you want to greet your competitors with when they enter your home court.

What about when it doesn’t? You know, the moments when the strong you goes missing and isn’t really rejoicing in the particular challenge of the day. What then?

My “word” this year is tension. What that means and how it comes to be is something for another post, or better yet, a conversation. (asker beware: asking me “How I am?” could elicit a word of the year response). Think of it as thematic. We may associate tension with a negative sense of anxiety or pressure but for me, the word is more about edges…the line where our strengths shift to weaknesses or the goods we rightly desire flip into the bads of “too much.” Tension holds the line when we push to the edges.

Curiously, the tension of resistance is a necessary element of building strength. Pressing to the edge of what we can and cannot do actually increases our capacity to do more. Pushing past that edge, we fall into failure, the place where the tension overwhelms our strength and we fall to a point where the tension is released. Repetitions at that edge increase our ability to sustain the tension.

Do the physics of tension and resistance apply beyond building muscle? Can we increase emotional or spiritual strength in the same way?

Adversity is a form of resistance that creates tension. Chevy Chase was poking fun at our tendency to fixate on the little struggles of our lives but we all go through moments when it’s no joke. Whether struggle comes in the form of a physical malady, the emotion of a relational issue, a particularly difficult problem at work, or a spiritual crisis of self brought on by all of the above, such adversity can threaten to overwhelm. What happens when our perseverance muscle fails?

I suppose when we start to unload the heaviness of our struggles to others, we’re really just wanting someone else to notice. Does anybody see this besides me? Am I in it alone?

I’m reminded of the poem, Everything is Waiting for You, by David Whyte:

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

What is it to rejoice in the challenge? It isn’t to say “thank you sir, may I have another” but to see the challenge through the lens of purpose. What is it telling you? Where is it leading you? What is waiting for you beyond this struggle, this suffering, this moment?

We need the tension to become. We need the resistance to grow. We need the struggle to make us, and keep us strong. We also need to remember that the tension will subside. The rough seas will calm. This moment will pass. We must remember that it is so.

Rejoicing in the challenge is trusting that it is taking you where you are supposed to be. It is making you who you are to become.

“Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation.” Everything is waiting for you.