Episode 66. Killing the Wolf

What in life deserves our time and attention and what things don't. I hope that as we consider that question along with other topics on this show, that we can all learn to live our lives just a little more intentionally. This is Seth Roberts. Thanks for joining me on Skipping Stones “Killing the Wolf.”

There's a moment in the Chronicles of Narnia when Peter, one of the young protagonists, comes face to face with a wolf that wants to kill him. When others go to him, the king of Narnia, Aslan says Back, let the prince win his spurs. I never thought much about this until the other day. I happened to be watching the movie with my kids, and I thought, why on earth would you ever risk letting even the least valuable person in your army be killed by an enemy in one-on-one combat if you don't have to?

If reality, I don't think this would ever happen, but being the story that this is, there has to be something more to it. If you haven't read the stories or watched the movie. It's a story about four young siblings that find themselves in a fantasy world when they stumble into it through an old magical wardrobe.

It turns out they were prophesied to come and help set the land free from the spell of the wicked white witch. Aslan is a magical lion that is the rightful ruler of Narnia and is something of a God-like figure. I understand it was the author's intention to have Aslan be a kind of representation of Jesus.

The books were, in fact, largely an adaptation of Christian concepts for the sake of children. This moment when Peter faces the wolf ultimately ends up being a transition point for him. It is the moment he transforms from a fearful child to a brave warrior. It is a kind of coming of age repeater, but more importantly, I think it represents the moments we all go through in life where we need to face something on our own two feet.

Alone. Confidence and competence in life is generated by doing hard things, and I think this is partly the lesson intended by this moment. In order to become greater, we cannot stay the same. We have to change and to change, we have to overcome  things that are in our way. When I was younger, I remember a lot of girls' favorite words seemed to be maturity.

Us boys we're constantly being told whether or not we were mature by our female peers. I honestly don't think they knew what they were talking about half the time, because in hindsight I think a lot of them were pretty immature as well. But now I too find myself judging people based on their maturity from time to time, and I don't think I have ever consciously thought about what criteria I'm making that judgment based on.

So I put my thinking cap on for the sake of this episode, and the best I can come up with is that maturity is what you attain after you take personal responsibility for overcoming hard things on behalf of other people. This is why the guy that's still partying hard into his thirties and forties somehow still comes across as juvenile.

Because that is simply not something that responsible people generally do after they learn to be responsible for something. In primitive cultures, there's often a kind of formalized transition where a boy goes from child to man. Many of these rituals involve the boy actually being required to face some kind of danger alone.

I think I heard in some Native American traditions, the boys were sent out into the wild and they had to stay out there. Until they witnessed a vision, and in another culture I read about the young boys would be taken from their mothers forcibly and couldn't come back until they could provide their mothers with meat.

As for females, responsibility for another person seems rather inherent to their nature. Especially when you consider their biological calling to bear children, and maybe this is why they say women tend to mature faster than boys. At any rate, there's a time for all of us where we benefit from being thrown out into the dark to face our fears when we face danger and overcome, it's transformative.

I've mentioned several times before that I have kids. Before you have kids, I think it's really easy to imagine that you will be a great parent that gets their kids to help out around the house and contribute. Once you have them, it soon becomes easy to see that yes, you can get them to help out, but it actually takes more work most of the time to have them help than it does to just do it yourself.

It is really easy to get in the habit of doing everything for your kids because quite simply, it's harder to have them help you as they get older, their ability to help increases. But even then, it's still sometimes easier to just do it yourself, but people are not meant to be totally reliant on others forever, and at some point it's going to hurt them if they still are.

The longer we wait to let them face the darkness themselves, the worse we make it for them later on. I had a girl that babysat for me at one point who was a student at FSU, which is the university here where I live, and she told me once that one of her friends was complaining that her parents only gave her a thousand dollars of monthly allowance.

She also told me she had to teach one of her roommates how to use the dishwasher. It seems like the modern perspective for a lot of families today [00:06:00] is that the purpose of college is to live it up before you have to start grinding in the workforce for the rest of your life. I can sympathize with that perspective because there really does come a point where we settle into a pattern and life can seem like a monotonous grind.

A lot of these parents maybe think that they are sparing their kids the struggle that they have had to go through. The problem I see with this is that the approach gives those children nothing to be proud of.  They're robbed of the experiences that they need to transform hardship to people is like, leave bread.

You cannot grow without it. When you've been working and providing for a family for years, you have perspective on what life is like, and so it's probably easy for you to appreciate the idea of having several carefree years in your youth. The problem with that is that for kids that haven't had any responsibilities for their whole life, they don't have the perspective to appreciate it.

How can you appreciate an opportunity in your life where you don't have to work and can travel with relative ease when you haven't even had any real responsibility in your life to compare that against? Most likely the world will force responsibility on them at some point, and they're going to miss those college years, and honestly, they will probably feel like they wasted them.

Because they lacked the perspective to appreciate them with a little more hardship in our children's lives. You may also find that they're not going to be quite as dumb as a lot of their peers. I saw something earlier today that talked about a paradox where people that are actually competent at a thing are the least likely to think that they're good at it.

And the people that are not are the most likely to think that they're the most competent. This thing I watched said that 45% of people think they are a top 5% performer at work.  When you are incompetent, you often are too ignorant to recognize that you are incompetent. And so, it goes with experience. You just don't know what you don't know.

So those poor little sheep that we call students go off to school and. Think that their lives are hard? They think they have hard lives because they do based on their limited experience. What is sad though, is how clueless they are to how much harder life can and likely will get when they find themselves totally unprepared for what most of us would consider to be just plain life.

Their pride and self-esteem will be deeply affected when they finally realize how behind they actually are. Sadly. It's mostly our fault as parents for not preparing them better. We cannot fully prepare our children for everything life has to challenge us with, but we can teach them, at least to some degree, that they can do hard things.

We do that by expecting them to do hard things when they're young. This doesn't necessarily mean we need to send them into the wilderness for a week and come back later to see if they survived, but it does mean we need to make the effort to prepare them and have expectations for them to do hard things.

In a way, the best gift we can offer our children is hardship. Self-esteem in life comes from doing hard things. It has never come from having nice things we cannot become without overcoming first. This is Skipping Stones “Killing the Wolf.” You can find this podcast anywhere you choose to listen to podcasts. For more information about me, feel free to visit skipping stones sr.com.

And if you enjoyed the show, please like or subscribe. If there is a topic you would like me to speak on, please feel free to email me. At info@skippingstonessr.com, new episodes will be released weekly every Monday.