Strength of Mind

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I was reading an interview one of these days and the person being interviewed (a tennis player) was talking about how the game can be so frustrating sometimes; if in the best of chances, one wins 5 tournaments in one year and one plays 25 tournaments, then one looses all the other matches. In no other game is the rate of losses/victories so unbalanced and also, because the majority of the other sports are team sports, there is always someone we can share the defeat with. In tennis we are alone, naked on court, with no one to blame or share responsibilities with. One must have a very strong frame of mind to survive in this game. And that is where my point comes in: what is strength of mind and how do we get it?

A friend of mine once told me (in a somewhat despizing tone) that we have to be strong to survive in this world and those who aren't will just be cast aside. I found this remark very ungenerous, for it sounded like it's an easy choice to be strong and those who aren't should be punished for not being so.

First of all strength is not a matter of choice. We are all born with certain characteristics. We didn't choose to have them, they were just given to us. Then, while we are young and our personalities are being formed, we do not have control over the events that shape us (we don't choose our families, we don't choose our environment, nor the situations that we face). Then suddenly we are grown up and now we have responsibilities over our lives. It is true that we can all choose right from wrong, but that power of choice comes only at a later stage in our lives when all that we are was already shaped by many hands and events. In these circumstances the fact that some of us come out strong is no more a merit than that some of us come out weak is a blame. Many times it's just a question of luck.

This fact is already a strong point against the affirmation above, but there is another. What is the definition of strength? Who set it and by what standards?

A person that is called solid in Europe or America, is not considered so in Asia, and a strong man in the XXI century might not have been so 500 years ago. Definitions and situations change over time and over space and what is strong by the current patterns could very well be weak in another world or in another time.

My belief is that we are all necessary in this world and none of us is better nor worse than the next. The weak are as necessary to the strong as darkness is necessary to brightness. We are all multilayered and what we are and what we achieve depends on many circumstances and on many people, so in my opinion it's much more strong the one that is clear sighted enough to recognize his frailties and brave enough to face them, than the one that arrogantly believes to be better just because he has more.

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A.C. Lisbon, 19th December 2005