Yesterday was one of those days: a day seemingly designed to reveal all of my weaknesses, to water the weeds and leave the flowers dry. It started when my aunt, who is also my boss at her law office, gave me a task I didn't know how to do. Rather than immediately admit this and ask for help, I sat and stewed, growing increasingly frustrated and angry with her, the work and especially myself. When I finally did ask her for help, I did so in a defensive way, as if she had given me the task to test my ability to figure it out on my own. After she helped me and I apologized for my defensiveness, I was able to complete the task and even found it enjoyable. Later, I went to handbell practice at my church. I have been playing handbells for almost a decade, so I consider myself a fairly advanced player. In one piece I have to quickly change bells with my left hand, and during a run-through last night I did not play the second bell exactly as it should be played. My director corrected me in a nice way: "Be sure to make a good circle, Emily." The next time we played that section, I played it properly and she said, "That's much better, Emily." When we took a moment's break before resuming practice, I could not stop myself from saying with an edge, "The reason I did not play it properly is because I have to do a really fast bell change there. It's a really hard part and I usually get it right. Just thought you should know that." My director acknowledged the difficulty of the part and we moved on. In hindsight I realize that my statement was completely unnecessary; in our choir and everywhere, we all make mistakes and are corrected for them. Sometimes we feel that we are justified in making these mistakes, sometimes we are angry that others' mistakes remain unnoticed when ours do not, and yet usually we have to bite our tongues, take the criticism and move on. My defensiveness in this instance did nothing but draw attention to my mistake and to my defensiveness. As these examples indicate, my greatest weakness is my pride. I dislike asking for help and, to an even greater degree, I dislike receiving it without asking for it; in other words, the only thing worse than surrendering my own pride is having it taken from me.
Here is my question: are our greatest weaknesses inevitably millstones, things that weigh us down and prevent us from soaring? If our greatest weakness is pride (and I think it is for most of us), this question is a hard one to answer. A person with no pride is a person with no sense of self, or at least no allegiance to self. If we do not take pride in anything we are or do, we have no identity, and without identity we are as good as dead. In order to answer this question, then, I think we need to reexamine the concepts of weakness and strength. We have all heard that our greatest weaknesses are also our greatest strengths, and we have also heard that strength is the opposite of weakness. Is it possible for both of these statements to be true? Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that "our strength grows out of our weaknesses", a statement which indicates that it is possible. In fact, it suggests that it is not only possible; it is necessary. Strength and weakness are not one and the same, but strength must arise from weakness. Weakness is the only origin of strength just as fear is the only origin of courage. If there is nothing to fear, one cannot be brave; similarly, if there is no opportunity for pride, one cannot be humble. False humility is worse than pride because pride is at least authentic. True humility is the acknowledgement and subsequent overcoming of pride rather than a denial of pride's existence. The irony of false humility is that it is weakness borne of weakness. If we do not acknowledge the original weakness, it will only breed more weakness.
The key, then, is to understand one's own trouble trait well enough to know when its application is justified and unjustified. If you struggle as I do with pride, stand up for yourself when you feel you need to and swallow your pride when you don't. Ironically, sometimes humility means shutting your mouth and sometimes it means opening it. I learned yesterday (a lesson I have admittedly "learned" countless times) that asking for help does not eradicate pride; if anything, it enables it. After asking my aunt for help, I was able to take pride in the work she assigned me. Of course, we will always struggle with our weaknesses, and none of us will be able to overcome them every time they rear their heads. We are only human, after all. Let's act like humans, then. Let's apologize and forgive, never forgetting that our ability to forgive grows out of our ability to apologize.
