![\"Winston](\"https:\/\/content.artofmanliness.com\/uploads\/2014\/12\/Churchill_Header.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Last month, we published a post on 6 reasons why it\u2019s especially hard to become an adult in the modern world<\/a>, and argued that despite this difficulty, the world still needs grown-ups.<\/p>\n And yet, as we admitted at the end, even when we know how necessary adults are to a flourishing, full-functioning society, it can still be hard to want to grow up ourselves. In popular culture, youth is associated with freedom, fun, and creativity, while grown-ups are seen as dull, constrained, and perpetually stressed out. Adults are perceived as lacking in imagination and zest for life, and seem to be ground down by their responsibilities. So who would want to join their ranks?<\/p>\n One of the most unfortunate tendencies of an adolescent culture<\/a> is the impulse to fit everything into black and white narratives. Narratives themselves aren\u2019t the issue; in fact, psychologists say that being able to view your life as a story is a key component to mental health and happiness. And as we\u2019ll come to see, being able to imagine yourself as an actor in that story \u2013 a kind of hero\u2019s journey<\/a> \u2013 is one of the most important ways of achieving an awesome adulthood. No, it\u2019s not narratives per se that are problematic, but ones that are overly simplistic and one-dimensional.<\/p>\n When you\u2019re young, you feel a burning desire to fit yourself neatly into a clear-cut conception of \u201cwho I am.\u201d This tendency may be even stronger in our modern world, where we can carefully curate an image of ourselves on social media of how we want others to view us. We\u2019re a hippie, or a hippie Christian. We\u2019re an adventurous world traveler, or a bookish homebody. We\u2019re a conservative, or someone who hates conservatives. Yet an identity that can be built with carefully chosen pictures, and selected from a platter of dropdown menus, is quite limiting. A clearly delineated identity can feel very secure, but it keeps us moving along a single track of thought and experience.<\/p>\n Part of maturity is being able to comfortably sit with two seemingly contradictory ideas and energies. \u201cI can be this<\/em> and that<\/em>.\u201d \u201cI can doubt that<\/em>, but believe this<\/em>.\u201d \u201cI can prioritize this<\/em>, without giving up my love for that<\/em>.\u201d Being able to comfortably operate in different dimensions has a two-fold benefit. First, it provides a satisfying steadiness that allows you to make real progress with your life. When you\u2019re young, you often go all-in on one phase, and then swing over whole hog into another when something in your life changes. If someone challenges how you\u2019re living at the peak of one of these phases, you feel incredibly angry. Or, if you come to feel one of your long-held beliefs isn\u2019t true, you tend to freak out<\/em>, and feel angry and betrayed, launching a period where you don\u2019t believe anything anymore, and define yourself only in opposition to your old creed.<\/p>\n As you mature, you become able to examine new ideas without feeling anxious or threatened by them; you gain the ability to calmly sift through your changing opinions and examine things more objectively. You have a core foundation of principles, but feel the freedom to play with other lines of thought. In doing so, sometimes you come to feel that there are expectations and \u201cshoulds\u201d of adulthood<\/a> that just seem silly, and you reject them. And sometimes, you realize that something you like or believe isn\u2019t completely rational, but you decide you don\u2019t care and keep it in your life anyway, simply because you enjoy it so much.<\/p>\n A comfort with contradictions may seem like a cop-out \u2013 feigned indifference in the guise of nuanced enlightenment. And it can be if it only amounts to a \u201cmeh\u201d attitude of \u201cit\u2019s all the same to me\u201d \u2013 in which there is no collision of various energies in one\u2019s life, because there are no energies, period. Certainly many an adult lives this kind of gray existence where not much thought is given to the meaning and purpose of life, outside of fulfilling one\u2019s basic necessities each day.<\/p>\n Yet to actually hold a whole spectrum of energies is something far different. In such a case the effect is something like a particle collider \u2013 in which the contact between your different beliefs\/ideas\/interests creates access to new knowledge and planes of existence that wouldn\u2019t have been possible otherwise.<\/p>\n Think about it \u2013 what are the best, most exciting, most engrossing movies\/books\/TV shows you\u2019ve consumed? Those with simplistic plots? Or those with rich narratives filled with complex characters, conflict, and some mystery?<\/p>\n When we\u2019re kids, children\u2019s books and films capture our attention. But as adults, we\u2019re ready to grapple with more. As it goes in media, so it goes in our lives. The false narrative in which \u201cbeing young is awesome\/being an adult sucks\u201d works well when you\u2019re actually young, but as you mature in age, it reaps increasingly diminished returns. To grow up well, you need a new mindset, one with an expanded palette of possibilities.<\/p>\n The greatest aspect of adulthood is one\u2019s ability to imagine whatever kind of life you\u2019d like for yourself, and to have the power, freedom, and independence to turn that vision into a reality. You can make whatever you will of it, without interference from parents, teachers, or other authority figures.<\/p>\n In this act of creation, you want to be able to draw not only from the toolbox of childlike inclinations, but those of adulthood as well. The task of growing up well is learning to keep the best energies of youth, while combining them with the different privileges and pleasures of maturity. To settle down, without completely settling in.<\/p>\n This may all seem hard to grasp in the abstract; it\u2019s much easier to understand when seen lived out in the life of an individual. And nobody embodied the possibility of combining a youthful love of adventure, imagination, and excitement with the adult qualities of soberness, duty, and responsibility more than Winston Churchill. Thus, over the course of the next several weeks, we will be conducting a case study on growing up well, using the British Bulldog as our guide.<\/p>\n When it comes to achieving one of the most interesting, eventful, and outright original adulthoods in history, Winston Churchill surely has no rival. He was a writer, a politician, an orator, a family man, a painter, a lifelong adventurer, and much, much more. Of the supreme fullness of Churchill\u2019s life, his biographer, William Manchester<\/a>, writes:<\/p>\n \u201cIf one accepts Freud\u2019s dictum that mental health is the ability to love and work, Churchill possessed his full mental health. If anything, Churchill had attained what the American humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow called \u2018self-actualization,\u2019 the condition at the top of Maslow\u2019s \u2018hierarchy of needs,\u2019 where is found creativity, morality, spontaneity, and the ability to parse problems, accept facts, and refute prejudices.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n When poet and literary critic John Squire met Churchill he summed up his impression of the man by saying this: \u201cI have met many politicians; this is the first one who was alive.\u201d<\/p>\n Or as Churchill himself put it, \u201cWe are all worms, but I do believe that I am a glow worm.\u201d<\/p>\n Winston didn\u2019t achieve his glow from journeying into adulthood with the mindset of \u201cthe best of life is behind me \u2013 time to put aside every childish thing and get on with being a boring old grown-up.\u201d Though Churchill did sometimes wax nostalgic about his youth \u2013 \u201cTwenty to twenty-five! These are the years!\u201d he declared when looking back over his life — he could also truthfully say that \u201cI have been happier every year since I became a man.\u201d So too, he counted the years 1940-41 as the very best of his life \u2013 years he experienced as a 60-something leader in a war-ravaged nation, an age when most men are retiring into a post-work glide, rather than delving into one of the most stressful events and positions imaginable.<\/p>\n Rather than believing that the end of his youth was the end of the greatest period of his life, Churchill always kept in front of him the knowledge of how short life really is, and how great the heights of human potential. To not just take advantage of his time, but to really, deeply enjoy it, instead of jettisoning his childish inclinations altogether, he marshaled them as fuel for the relishing of his adult responsibilities. He felt no pressure to keep his identity and his life\u2019s narrative cropped into neat categories; Churchill was quite happy to live with a myriad of seeming contradictions:<\/p>\n He was full of boyish mischief, humor, and enthusiasm, and yet willingly took on what was arguably the 20th<\/sup> century\u2019s greatest burden of leadership.<\/p>\n He continually sought for adventure, but was happiest at home with his wife and children, and found his greatest pleasure in life\u2019s most simple: good food, good drink, and good company.<\/p>\n He outsourced his daily duties from dressing to feeding himself to servants, but reveled in the dirt, danger, and hardship of being in the trenches of war.<\/p>\n He was a staunch traditionalist, who lived and breathed the lessons of history, but could also be incredibly innovative and forward thinking.<\/p>\n He was agnostic in his religious beliefs, but maintained a moral code of absolutes and saw life as an outright battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil.<\/p>\n He could be tough and hard-nosed, and yet cheerfully admitted to being an unabashed sentimentalist who cried regularly and freely.<\/p>\n He was detail-oriented and realistic, and yet imaginative, intuitive, and thoroughly Romantic.<\/p>\n He was learned and thoughtful, and yet defined his identity and success through action.<\/p>\n He worked like 10 men, and played like a little boy.<\/p>\n It is not as if all of these propensities always worked together smoothly in tandem. Quite not; the man had plenty of flaws. His was the true hero\u2019s journey \u2013 with all the excitement, joy, mystery, and yes, messiness, that the greatest of such tales invariably involve. As Manchester remarks, his life was \u201ca moral journey of many twists and turns, of chutes and ladders\u2026For every diarist who notes his exuberance, fairness, geniality, or generosity, there is to be found another who alludes to his roughness, his sarcasm, his low moods, and his bellicosity\u2014sometimes the same observer on the same day.\u201d As one of Churchill\u2019s colleagues observed, Winston truly had a \u201czigzag streak of lightning on the brain.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet having at least a little bit of that lightning may be the very best way to avoid the dull grayness of adulthood. All grown-ups have flaws; none of us completely succeed in mastering the impulses of our youth. But that doesn\u2019t mean we ought to squash such impulses entirely. Left unchanneled, these energies can indeed imperil our progress into maturity; but properly harnessed, they can be vital in moving it along.<\/p>\n That\u2019s how Churchill saw it. He was very fond of Plato\u2019s Allegory of the Chariot<\/a>, where the human spirit is likened to a chariot pulled by a white and a dark horse. The white horse represents man\u2019s noble, spirited aims, while the dark horse symbolizes his appetite for fame, wealth, food, and drink. The charioteer is tasked with keeping the two disparate steeds in harness, working together to pull the chariot into the heavens that it might glimpse eternal truths and sit among the gods. Though having two horses full of energy and thumos<\/em><\/a> makes them harder to control, it also makes their potential so much greater. Churchill\u2019s own horses often pulled in different directions, and sometimes got him off track, but the overall trajectory was always the same \u2013 onwards and upwards.<\/p>\n If it still seems difficult to grasp how different energies might be incorporated into your life in order to cultivate an interesting, adventurous, and fulfilling adulthood, fear not \u2013 each installment of this series will explore these dichotomies in full. Today represents only an introduction to the \u201ccurriculum\u201d we\u2019ll now begin to explore.<\/p>\n And while it might seem that lessons from Churchill\u2019s life wouldn\u2019t apply to us average joes, since he conducted his on such an outsized, historically significant stage, the fundamental insights one can glean are truly timeless and universal, and can help anyone grow up better.<\/p>\n As we\u2019ll come to see, the crux of what Churchill has to teach us is this: the key to an awesome adulthood is to embrace the grownup power to make the desires and dreams of one\u2019s childhood a reality, and that the task of doing so involves a rich toolbox of energies \u2013 those both of youth and maturity. Though one may never go down in history as a hero, one can choose to live each day heroically.<\/p>\n Join us for the Winston Churchill School of Adulthood to find out how.<\/p>\n A Prerequisite Class on Becoming the Author of Your Own Life<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last month, we published a post on 6 reasons why it\u2019s especially hard to become an adult in the modern world, and argued that despite this difficulty, the world still needs grown-ups. And yet, as we admitted at the end, even when we know how necessary adults are to a flourishing, full-functioning society, it can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44513,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[502,42272],"tags":[42298],"class_list":["post-44500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-character","category-manly-lessons","tag-winston-churchill"],"featured_image_urls":{"large":"https:\/\/content.artofmanliness.com\/uploads\/2014\/12\/Churchill_Header-538x280.jpg","rpwe-thumbnail":"https:\/\/content.artofmanliness.com\/uploads\/2014\/12\/Churchill_Header-45x45.jpg"},"yoast_head":"\nGalloping in Harness, or Fueling the Particle Collider of Adulthood<\/h3>\n
![\"Winston](\"https:\/\/content.artofmanliness.com\/uploads\/2014\/12\/Churchill-Quote-1.png\")
<\/p>\nEnroll in the Winston Churchill School of Adulthood<\/h3>\n
Read the Entire Series<\/h3>\n
\nLesson #1: Develop a Mighty Moral Code<\/a>
\nLesson #2: Establish a Daily Routine<\/a>
\nLesson #3: Live Romantically<\/a>
\nLesson #4: Cultivate a Nostalgic Love for History<\/a>
\nLesson #5: Don’t Give Up Your Sense of Adventure<\/a>
\nLesson #6: Don’t Be Afraid to Start a Family<\/a>
\nLesson #7: Work Like a Slave; Command Like a King; Create Like a God<\/a>
\nTips on Hustling, Leadership, and Hobbies from Winston Churchill<\/a>
\nConclusion: Thought + Action = An Awesome Adulthood<\/a><\/p>\n