I gave a speech to a business group last spring. After preparing for hours, I stood before the lunch crowd with a few notes and a lot to say. Starting slowly, I made connections with the crowd and used those connections to segue into the body of my lecture. I used imagery, first-person narrative, and grand themes to highlight the important points of my speech.
My pace quickened and I pounded the lectern for effect and brushed aside the air with my hands to emphasize and underscore. I built into the crescendo and almost shouted the meatier parts of my speech. Then, I allowed the moment to quiet again, finishing with a point made with an almost-whisper. It was dead quiet. Then, applause. I have them, I thought. They love me.
After the luncheon, I shook a few hands and stepped into an elevator with a lady in a red dress whom I had noticed at the luncheon. After a few quiet moments as the car started moving, she looked at me. I nodded at the thought she was about to thank me for my wise and wonderful words. Then, turning to me, she raised an eyebrow and said, "Were you our speaker today?"
Ah, humility.
An active and well-lived life is a long, winding path that has a profound beginning, an obvious bread-crumb trail, and reaches up into the present day. We decode our lives in terms of what we've done right, and what has gone horribly wrong. In Cyrano de Bergerac, Cyrano stabs at his weaknesses in his moving death scene, fighting them off at the bitter end. But the reality for many of us is that we often stab the air in search of our better angels.
I often think of a boy I taught several years ago. He was in the foster care system and had been severely neglected and abused, unable to hold the gaze of adults as a result. The boy's foster mother brought him in. He was a shell. The abuse had emptied his strength and sewed those wicked seeds of doubt, the seeds that grow in all of us but had grown like kudzu within him.
I wondered if the boy would make it. The first few weeks were awful as he navigated hallways filled with boisterous teenagers. He was a fragile soul in a school full of lively adolescents. During lunch, he sat by himself near a planter every day, not looking up, pretending he was working on homework.
One day, Brother Richard Sanker, the school guidance counselor, asked him to come into the office and brush the school dog, a therapeutic move that's a great benefit of having a dog on campus. I watched as the boy brushed the dog the first time and noticed the care he took, how he quietly spoke to the big German shepherd as he gently brushed the dog's massive back. The boy came back the next day unbidden. And then the next.
Every day, the boy would stroke the dog and say, "It's going to be all right, boy, it's going to be all right," over and over again until I finally understood he wasn't talking to the dog, he was convincing himself that things were going to be all right.
Slowly, this boy came out of his shell. He put on weight, he began raising his hand in class, and more importantly, he began to advocate for himself. The boy had a good foster family and his mother would call me at night and put him on the phone when they argued. More than once, I listened to the argument and whispered a prayer of thanks for the normalcy of it.
No one knew what the boy was overcoming with every single step he took in school. He joined activities. He began working out and became physically strong. And, emotionally, he was healing.
I put him in my class for his senior year and towards the end of the year, as I lectured, I noticed a letter placed in his binder and the binder turned obviously in my direction. It was a scholarship letter, a full ride to a great university. I made him stand up and the class applauded as the boy bowed and grinned.
Humility. It's more than the avoidance of fluff in a personal narrative, more than resisting self-applause after a mediocre speech. Humility is the delicate dance of knowing where you came from, reflecting on the path you've traveled, and discerning where you are now. But it's not the beginning that makes the difference. It's the path you chose to get to the present, to get to the end, that matters. It is the real work accomplished in the name of a goal.
Somewhere lost in the depths of the social media generation, humility waits for the moment to rise again. We all suffer from bouts of humility suppression and we all allow ego to rise like cake in an oven from time to time. Many of us lose focus of the realities of our lives and trend toward presenting a life that gets a lot of figurative likes for our carefully curated social media pages.
But within every single one of us lies a story. It's a story not governed by the beginning or even the end. It's a story that is most genuine in the chapters in between. Humility involves understanding those chapters, accepting those chapters, and using them as a source of strength. Because, humility is strength.
That boy is married now. He has a great job and stops by school whenever he's in town. Every single time, he kneels next to the new school dog and pets him. He still carefully and fully strokes the dog's back but his whispers have changed. Now, he whispers, "You're a good boy, you're a good boy."
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Steve Straessle, whose column appears every other Saturday, is the principal of Little Rock Catholic High School for Boys. You can reach him at sstraessle@lrchs.org.
Editorial on 10/20/2018