02/28/14

The Mainspring of Exertion

The sport of beursault developed in the Middle Ages to train military archers in the use of the longbow. Detail from the Luttrell Psalter, circa 1320-1340, in the British Library.

There are beautifully landscaped gardens scattered throughout the countryside of northern France and Belgium dedicated to the local archery sport of beursault.

Developed in the Middle Ages to train military archers using longbows, beursault requires an archer to shoot well in various situations made difficult with changing wind and lighting conditions.

An archer strolling on the path encircling a traditional beursault garden will suddenly come upon a narrow open corridor cut between rows of trees or well-manicured shrubs set in flower beds. Rows of timber or masonry wall panels, varying in height, and interlaced among the greenery on either side, usually shield this corridor from other areas of the garden.

By regulation, the open space between the panel blinds is only five and a half feet across.

Down this open range the archer will spy a round black and white target—known as a butt—placed at the far end of the corridor, a little over fifty yards away, and paired with a similar butt at his feet.

In modern beursault competition, to score a maximum number of points, the archer must shoot a single arrow down this leafy gauntlet and center it in a zone less than two inches wide on the opposite butt.

It takes tremendous skill to shoot an arrow down the cramped space, especially if overhanging branches or other obstructions create a tunnel that constricts the arrow’s natural flight arc.

A special moment occurs when the beursault archer successfully sinks an arrow into the center of the butt at the far end of the corridor.

Many things must act together in perfect synchronicity to achieve this success: a proactive mind, a sharp eye, keen senses in tune with the environment, and the disciplined focus of an athlete controlling a skillful release technique developed from hours of practice.

And, perhaps, a little luck to hold it all together.

As such, at the instant of release, the beursault archer is a physical metaphor of a larger concept the ancient Greeks called kairos, the critical moment in time where opportunity intersects with fortune, or, more colloquially, “the right place at the right time.”

Frederick Douglass, in a famous speech titled “Self-Made Men” that he first delivered in 1859 just prior to the Civil War, also used the allegory of an arrow to analyze the trajectory of a human life in matters of luck, success and fortune. “The scene presented from this view is as a thousand arrows shot from the same point and aimed at the same object,” he said. “United in aim, they are divided in flight. Some fly too high, others too low. Some go to the right, others to the left. Some fly too far and others, not far enough, and only a few hit the mark. Such is life. United in the quiver, they are divided in the air. Matched when dormant, they are unmatched in action.”

Daguerreotype of Frederick Douglass circa 1847-52

But Douglass—a former slave who by then had, through hard work, determination, and the sheer power of his pen, risen to become one of the most famous and eloquent opponents of slavery in America—rejected the theory that luck alone separated the lives of great men and women from the mass of less successful people around them.

A voracious reader of history who knew many of the great men and women of his own time, Douglass recognized that “it is one of the easiest and commonest things in the world for a successful man to be followed in his career through life and to have constantly pointed out this or that particular stroke of good fortune which fixed his destiny and made him successful.”

With keen intellect, he scrutinized and criticized those who made apologies for their own lack of effort. “If not ourselves great, we like to explain why others are so,” he said. “We are stingy in our praise to merit, but generous in our praise to chance. Besides, a man feels himself measurably great when he can point out the precise moment and circumstance which made his neighbor great.”

His “main objection to this very comfortable theory is that, like most other theories, it is made to explain too much. While it ascribes success to chance and friendly circumstances, it is apt to take no cognizance of the very different uses to which different men put their circumstances and their chances. Fortune may crowd a man’s life with fortunate circumstances and happy opportunities, but they will, as we all know, avail him nothing unless he makes a wise and vigorous use of them.”

Opportunity was important but exertion was “indispensable” to the son of an illiterate slave who had worked hard at every opportunity to educate himself as a young man, often at the risk of his own life.

Douglass, from hard-won experience, knew well the stubborn fact that the process of learning from the past of others and then rolling up the sleeves to “Work! Work!! Work!!! Work!!!!” was the key to future personal success, regardless of the trials or tragedies experienced along the way.

A kairos moment would then provide the necessity required for what Douglass called “the mainspring of exertion.”

“The presence of some urgent, pinching, imperious necessity, will often not only sting a man into marvellous exertion, but into a sense of the possession, within himself, of powers and resources which else had slumbered on through a long life, unknown to himself and never suspected by others. A man never knows the strength of his grip till life and limb depend upon it. Something is likely to be done when something must be done.”

If we, like Douglas, make a close study of history, we will realize that the people who lived before us often succeeded in the extraordinary moment of their lives because of how they regularly worked and conducted themselves in their ordinary moments.

They were once skilled archers in the beursault garden of history who found success in the right place and the right time.

This knowledge can inspire us to emulate their most valuable aspects—courage and determination, character and integrity, knowledge and enthusiasm, loyalty and sacrifice, self-dependence and a proper work ethic—and adopt them into our own daily life.

These are simple virtues, but virtue can be the hardest thing to come by in a hard moment unless it is regularly practiced into muscle memory. This is the best we can do to prepare for our own kairos moment when it comes—and it will.

In the end, these lessons found in the exploration of kairos moments are the greatest contributions our very human predecessors gave to us—and to history.

For the complete text of “Self-Made Men” visit http://www.monadnock.net/douglass/self-made-men.html

02/11/14

Bird Woman

Albert Bierstadt 1866
A Storm in the Rocky Mountains

That winter was unusually bitter at Fort Mandan on the Missouri River, so cold, in fact, that the river froze solid enough to allow the great herds of bison then wandering freely over the prairies of what is now North Dakota to meander from bank to bank without breaking through the ice. (1)

Despite the cold, life continued on as it normally did in the five bustling villages of the indigenous Mandan and Hidatsa nations situated just upriver from the cottonwood palisade fort.

It was there, on February 11, 1805, just as the sun was dipping low on a clear horizon to the west, that a 16-year-old Shoshone woman named Sacagawea—captured from her own people years earlier—delivered her first child into the world after a long and painful delivery, assisted by a secret rattlesnake potion and the more scientific efforts of an American Army captain named Meriweather Lewis. (2)

Lewis and another officer, William Clark, were wintering among the Mandan before continuing their journey west with three squads of enlisted men hand-picked for an exploratory expedition commissioned two years before by President Thomas Jefferson.

There have been few journeys in history like it before or since. The members of the Corps of Discovery would travel more than 8,000 miles through some of the most rugged and isolated terrain of the western United States, all the while creating around 140 maps and documenting precious details of the natural world and indigenous cultures along the way.

It was a journey that would test the inner mettle of the hardiest infantrymen, but the young Sacagawea, hired on as a translator, would match these men step for step, all the while laboring for her infant son and less hardy husband, a French trader who had won her in a bet from her captors.

She was known to them as “Bird Woman.” Despite exercising limited power over her own situation, she would display indispensable reserves of dignity, loyalty, and perseverance.

On more than one occasion the success of the venture would hinge upon her efforts. She would save the expedition’s prized records from a capsizing boat, convincing Lewis to ascribe to her “equal fortitude and resolution with any person on board at the time of the accident.” (3)

Her calm presence among the men would be a sign of peace to hostile parties along the way, and, as translator, she would become the mouthpiece for a westward-looking nation that was not even her own.

It was in August that same year, on top of the Continental Divide, that fate would select her for a great kairos moment to save the expedition and spare, in all likelihood, the lives of the men with her.

At a low point of the journey—out of food and critical supplies, and needing horses to proceed—the explorers were confronted by a band of suspicious Shoshones led by a warrior named Cameahwait.

Sitting down to a parlay with an extremely tenuous outcome, Lewis plied Cameahwait with gifts, using Sacagawea as an interpreter.

Truth suddenly became stranger than fiction when Sacagawea recognized Cameahwait as the brother she had known in the years before her capture. Jumping up, she “ran & embraced him & threw her blanket over him & cried profusely.” (3)

Softening, an astonished Cameahwait agreed to cooperate with the group’s mission, supplying them with provisions, horses, and guides through the rugged mountain passes between them and the sea.

The site where the parley occurred later became known as Camp Fortunate, near what is now Dillon, Montana, a physical reminder of the role that kairos, and an extraordinary young mother, played in the destiny of a republic.

Clark would later praise Sacagawea in a letter to her husband, “Your woman who accompanied you that long dangerous and fatiguing rout to the Pacific Ocian and back deserved a greater reward for her attention and services on that rout than we had in our power to give her.” (5)

1814 Map of the Lewis and Clark Track Across the Western Portion of North America

(1) Stephen E. Ambrose, Undaunted Courage (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 191.

(2) Meriweather Lewis, Journal Entry February 11, 1805. http://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/index.html

(3) Ibid. May 16, 1805.

(4) Ambrose, 277.

(5) Donald Jackson, ed., Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, with Related Documents: 1783-1854, 2nd Ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), vol. I, 315.

02/1/14

Blaze of Glory

Rick Rescorla is a supreme example of a man who consciously embraced his kairos moment when it finally came to him.

An Englishman by birth, Rescorla died a true American hero.

An account of his actions during the Sept.11, 2001, attacks on New York’s Trade Center towers can be found discreetly tucked into the appendix section of the 2008 book We Are Soldiers Still. The book’s author, Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore—a legendary Army commander who led ground troops during the famed Battle of Ia Drang Valley, the opening salvo of the Vietnam War—gives an account of the last few moments in the life of his friend Rescorla, an infantry officer who had served under him in the battle.

First Edition Cover Page

An iconic photograph of a ruggedly posed Rescorla, M16 in hand, snapped in the heat of the 1965 battle, graces the cover of Moore’s other book, the 1992 best-seller We Were Soldiers Once…and Young, later adapted into a Hollywood film starring Mel Gibson.

Despite finding professional success, Rescorla experienced personal tragedy in the few years prior to the September 11 attacks. Divorced and remarried, with two children, he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1994.

As Moore tells it,

He had written and spoken to close friends about his fears of retirement in a year or two and how it appeared that his life would end without the kind of great and meaningful cosmic event summed up in the Greek word kairos. “I have accepted the fact that there will never be a kairos moment for me,” Rescorla wrote in an e-mail to his old battle buddy, battalion surgeon Dr. William Shucart, six days before 9/11. “Just an uneventful Miltonian plow-the-fields discipline…a few more cups of mocha grande at Starbucks, each one losing a little bit more of its flavors.” To another friend Rescorla grumbled, “God, look at us. We should have died performing some great deed—go out in a blaze of glory, not end up with someone spoon-feeding us and changing our nappies.” (1)

A few days later, Rescorla got a shot at his great wish.

At 8:46 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists flew a commercial airliner into the top floors of the tower across from his 44^th floor office in Building Two of the World Trade Center, Rescorla sprang into action.

Rescorla grabbed a bullhorn and began evacuating the 2,700 people under his care spread out across 20 floors and a separate office building on the tower complex.

At 9:03 a.m., when terrorists flew a second hijacked airliner into Building Two, Rescorla had already escorted most of Morgan Stanley’s employees out of the building while the rest were escaping down the stairwells.

When the building finally collapsed only thirteen Morgan Stanley employees, the 62-year-old Rescorla among them, were killed alongside the nearly three thousand other victims of the World Trade Center attacks.

Afterwards, no trace of Rescorla’s body was ever found among the smoking debris of the shattered steel skyscrapers. He had left this life just as he had wished to go: “in a blaze of glory.”

The ancient Greeks would have recognized Rescorla’s simple, yet profound, brand of heroism.

The “great and meaningful cosmic event” he had so longed for had been named by them thousands of years earlier.

They had sorted through the actions of their own great heroes, studied the flaming arcs of fate, fame, and fortune, and discovered the one turning wheel that made them all come together.

They had distilled it and named it.

It was kairos.

To them, it was the moment in time where the gods met with mortals.

Even today, as Rescorla’s story shows us, it is still a moment where men and women can open a door to fate and reveal an amazing purpose for their lives—and make history.

(1) Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway, We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008), 211.

Recommended additional reading: Stewart, James B. Heart of a Soldier. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002.

01/22/14

Let the Dice Fly High

Vercingetorix throws down his arms at the feet of Julius Caesar. Painting by Lionel Royer, 1899.
Caeasar’s successes in Gaul shifted the balance of power he shared with his rival Pompey and prompted his crossing of the Rubicon.

One of the most definitive kairos moments in history unfolded in a cold and dark hour one early January morning in 49 B.C.

Warriors of Rome’s Thirteenth Twin Legion, veterans of the violent Gallic wars that had consumed much of the Roman Republic’s martial energy over the previous decade, stood on the bank of the Rubicon river on the edge of their homeland.

Their loyalty rested on the man who had first led them out of those fields on the opposite side of the river and across the high Alps at their backs. He stood among them, singled out by both the station he had achieved in life and the burden of the decision he was weighing in his mind.

His name was Gaius Julius Caesar, one of two surviving triumvirs of Rome, and he was now the declared enemy of a republic that had dominated much of the Mediterranean world for nearly half of a millennium. His dark eyes peered out from his broad face with the intense stare of a hawk and reflected the flickering light thrown from a nearby torch as he surveyed the unfolding scene. (1)

Caesar’s “thoughts began to work,” wavering as he weighed the consequences of the action of the hour. According to Plutarch Caesar “revolved with himself, and often changed his opinion one way and the other, without speaking a word. This was when his purposes fluctuated most…computing how many calamities his passing that river would bring upon mankind, and what a relation of it would be transmitted to posterity.” (2)

He quietly discussed the situation with a few close advisors. There was little they could say—to the north lay exile and defeat; to the south lay civil war and ruin. Caesar’s next step would be irrevocable, carrying the ripple of drama to the farthest corners of his world.

The lynchpin moment, though great, was short. Caesar had turned fifty years old the previous July, but his decisiveness, energy, and drive were still terrifying traits to behold. Lifting his voice above the din in the darkness behind him, “in a sort of passion,” he abandoned “himself to what might come, and using the proverb frequently in their mouths who enter upon dangerous and bold attempts” Alea iacta est—Let the dice fly high “with these words he took the river.” (3)

Caesar would go on to defeat his enemies as they fled Rome, shaken loose by the speed of his approach and the confidence of the battle-scarred men at his side. He would later crush his rival Pompey in a final battle at Pharsalus in central Greece, despite being outnumbered three to one, and chase Pompey to his death on the far shores of Egypt.

The day would come when he would crown himself dictator of a new Roman empire, launching a new halcyon age for a 500-year-old civilization that would endure 500 years more.

The muddy channel of the Rubicon eventually became lost to history as time eroded the coastal plain it traversed on its fall from the Apennine Mountains running the spine of the Italian peninsula to the west. But the river’s more enduring imprint fossilized into the eponymous symbol of definitive action, the climax in every drama triggering a final denouement away from the familiar.

“Crossing the Rubicon” became the calculated point in a chain of action beyond which one could only press on to a new and different horizon.

What are you prepared to risk when you find yourself standing at your own Rubicon?

Bust of Julius Caesar
Vatican Museum

(1) “Caesar is said to have been tall, fair, and well-built, with a rather broad face and keen, dark-brown eyes.” Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, The Twelve Caesars, 1:45, as translated by Robert Graves (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957) revised by James B. Rives, 2007.

(2) A. H. Clough, tr., Plutarch’s Lives of Illustrious Men (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1881), 517.

(3) Ibid.

01/1/14

The Kairos Project: This Time, It’s Different

A new year. A new moment arrives fresh, flashes like a jewel, then is gone forever.

Modern English has only one word—time—for the concept of temporal space, but the ancient Greeks divided it into two concepts: chronos and kairos.

Chronos referred to chronological time as modern societies now see it, the constant flow of seconds into minutes into hours. But at certain points along this stream of chronological time there are rare occasions where exceptional circumstances come together like the hinges of a door. These intersections are the right place and the right time for very special events to occur. The Greeks viewed these kairos moments as occurring in Fate’s time, as great cosmic events that could be seized to benefit those who were prepared for them. To them, a kairos moment, given by the gods, changed one’s destiny.

This concept of kairos is at the heart of some of history’s greatest stories. When you begin to see history with a kairosperspective, you see how kairos moments were seized to raise nations, explore foreign lands, and discover new frontiers of science, literature, industry and art. Many individuals who experienced a kairos moment achieved lasting renown as great leaders, pioneers, thinkers or heroes. Many more simply used a kairos moment to make a quiet corner of the world a better place.

Studying these “hinge” moments raises enduring questions. Why do we consider certain people in history great? Great people are no less human than you or me. We all share the same number of hours in a day. What enabled these men and women to each seize their own kairos moment in time? Were they blessed with special skills, or were their actions simply met with incredible luck? Did they see their kairos moments for what they were when they happened, or only after the fact? Are some people simply destined for success and besheret, a Yiddish word meaning it is just a person’s fate to be at the right place at the right time? Or, less laissez faire, does it pay to be proactive, gaining success in the extraordinary kairos moment by good habits formed in the many small everyday moments? Is the ability to see the extraordinary in the ordinary the key to producing a positive, great, and memorable life?

Many kairos moments are so incredible they seem almost providential, and certainly seemed that way to the people experiencing them. So, an even more intangible question: do clues exist in the historical record of a supernatural God who freely shapes the course of human events?

On this blog I will explore all of these questions and many more as I take a fascinating look at history using the kairos perspective. How do you see time? I invite you to see it differently and join me on this journey.

Kairos

Portraits at the Hinges of History

Tag Archives: destiny