51. PROGRESS IS NOT INEVITABLE, Part Two
Courage doesn’t always roar, sometimes it’s the quiet voice at the end of the day whispering, “I will try again tomorrow.”
- Mary Anne Radmacher
In 2014, the Canadian Armed Forces met a rare distinction: over a ten-year period ending that year, more servicemembers had died from suicide than from combat in Afghanistan1. I remember reading that statistic and being angry because it represented more than a bunch of numbers. I knew some of those who’d taken their own lives, even if they hadn’t received the dignity of being named. Over and over, I stared at the report, wondered what I could do beyond the normal scope of being in the military.
What came to me, was to write a book.
By way of background, very often service members with post-traumatic stress won’t talk to their family or friends about their suffering, so their loved ones don’t know what signs to look for, how to help, or even what PTSD is. My idea, then, was to write a fictional account of a soldier suffering through post-traumatic stress as a kind of dramatic aide-memoire, a story that would cover all the symptoms and which, in turn, would help people understand what a service member might be going through.
The first draft of that book was terrible, and that’s not me being hard on myself. First drafts are always bad and this was my first novel, so it was doubly terrible. Didn’t matter that I told myself that though, what I felt was that not only was the book terrible, but that I was terrible also and would never not be terrible as a writer.
I wanted to quit.
Later, when I’d finished the book but couldn’t get it published, I wanted to quit again. Then again, after my first bad review, and many times more with my second and third books. So many times, I wanted to quit and the thing is, if I’d quit, I’d never have improved. If I’d quit, I’d never have been able to write this book, which may be the most important thing I’ve ever written.
You know, the citizens of Greek city-states, or the Roman or Aztec empires, or the Han Dynasty might have all shared similar thoughts on progress as President Obama. They might have all thought they’d be around forever and that things would keep getting better, and yet their civilizations fell all the same.
They quit, in a way, gave up fighting for whatever dream had sustained their societies. I’m sure that’s not how they would have viewed what happened, but in the end, they’re not around anymore, which is kind of the point.
Look at it this way. A civilization is like a tree. When it’s young, it needs nurturing and protecting. Over time, it puts down roots. If cultivated properly, a civilization can become self-sustaining, to a degree. But, like a tree, a civilization can never really be left unattended, because all it takes is a prolonged drought or long, dark winter to deprive it of resources and kill it.
What I’m trying to say here is that progress takes work, whether it’s a civilization or being a writer or whatever you have as your own personal goal. Every. Single. Day. And, sometimes, no matter what we do, a fire can burn down a tree in an instant, no matter how deep the roots or how much work we’ve done to get to that point. So too civilization, or our own efforts to serve others. One. Bad. Day. That’s all it can take to burn everything down, to erase all our progress.
Even if that happens though, I’d argue that nothing really changes. Our response to failure is the same because even after calamity, progress demands that we get back up and do the work. We can get better, and we can make the world better, if we work at it.
The road to helping our communities become resilient will be long, and there will be bad days. A journey’s first step might be the hardest, but that doesn’t mean all the rest of them will be tiptoes through the tulips. There will be days we feel out of control. There will be days we feel like we’re in the ring with a prize fighter who’s hitting us body blow after body blow. There will be days we want to give up in the face of what seems like certain failure, in the face of our own terribleness, especially when it comes to climate change since it’s so damn complex.
Remember though, we are not powerless because we always have the ability to choose how to respond to what life throws at us. If we fall, we can choose to get up. And, if we fall seven times, we can get up eight.
All it takes is the courage to keep getting up.
Bruce Campion-Smith, ‘Suicide claims more soldiers than those killed by Afghan combat,’ The Toronto Star, Sep 17, 2014, https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/09/16/suicide_claims_more_soldiers_than_those_killed_by_afghan_combat.html, accessed Sep 29, 2021.