Adversity is the story we tell

When I was a youth, my volleyball team would encircle our hands placed together in the middle and yell “tenacity!” on the count of three.  It was just one of many things we shouted together as a demonstration of teamwork; I never thought too hard about it.  We were a scrappy little team from a tiny town with little opportunity for early skills development.  But we had tenacity.  We went up against those big schools with their big-name coaches and their players that had been playing since they were knee high to a grasshopper (in our small town lingo), and we held our own.  We would return to our tiny town and regale everyone with stories of how we scraped by in this match, or barely saved that match, how we avoided this team’s big time blocker, or fielded that team’s powerful smashes.  The challenges we overcame. The hard won red-faced smiles.

I thought about this recently while backpacking on the Neusiok Trail in eastern North Carolina with a group of women. This trail, that traverses highways, and incorporates some gravel roads into its length, is mostly suffering for some vague notion of comradery.  Mutual suffering, that is.  There were no long rewarding vistas, hardly any interesting plants, nothing but aching feet and mud soaked clothes, and a few bloody thorn wounds.  But still, I would do it again.  There’s something enticing about mutual suffering—the accomplishment of making it through. The hard won red-faced smiles.

It's not unlike, I suppose, the hazing of brotherhoods.  The closeness you feel to those who went through it with you.  There is purpose to such madness, though it is never quite realized until after the fact, I think.  Adversity is the story we tell, after all.  With none such adversity, our lives might be quite content, indeed, but suffer instead from a dearth of stories.  And since we’re made almost entirely of our stories, we must create adversity in its absence so that we become something.  So, we take on unnecessary challenges like backpacking untold miles, trekking to the ends of the earth, climbing mountains, and the like.  Challenges that, once overcome, result in hard won red-faced smiles. Smiles that contain the value of adversity, even manufactured adversity.

This is true in our farming career as well.  Farming can get rather routine and boring when everything goes according to plan.  Fortunately, never does everything go according to plan when one is working with nature.  Instead, we have plenty of stories to tell. We reminisce of high winds blowing down structures, floods washing away crops, the scrambles to protect sensitive crops from hard late freezes, and, yes, after we overcame those adversities together, the hard won red-faced smiles.

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