If I were to pose the question, "What is a Warrior?", the answer I would probably get from most people today would either be that of a long-haired, shield-bearing, sword-wielding barbarian or a short-haired, gun-toting camouflaged soldier. OK, so both are correct, but the image I would really like to look at is the image of the warrior within every one of us.
At the simplest level, a warrior is one who fights. Taking this view and expanding upon it, this could be fighting for the environment by recycling their rubbish, fighting for better recognition at work, fighting the cravings for nicotine when trying to give up smoking, or just fighting to survive in modern society. All of these actions are the actions of a warrior and there is not a single piece of violence in any of them (though be careful around the person giving up smoking!).
Every single one of these actions is tapping into the spirit of the warrior. The spirit of standing up for what is right, for what we believe in or even just what is needed to survive. It is easier to destroy the planet than look after it, it is easier to keep one’s head down in the office, to carry on smoking or to just curl up in a corner when the going gets tough – but we don't, we fight (well, perhaps not on the smoking as I have the ashtray beside me as I type this!).
The basic traits of the sword-wielding or gun-toting warrior are the same as the everyday fighter – courage, skill and determination. All three are needed, for without one the effectiveness of the others are greatly diminished.
Having courage is not the same thing as not being afraid. There are many times when being afraid is a very sensible thing. Courage can be the ability to act in spite of the fear. I recently attended a seminar on public speaking. Apparently speaking in public is one of the all-time greatest fears. However, a phrase that was often used is, "feel the fear and do it anyway". There are very few people who do not get nervous before speaking in public. However, if the message is important enough, then it becomes worthwhile to overcome the fear and tell people.
There is a fine line between courage and stupidity however. Some fear should be listened to and acted upon accordingly. Is it courage or stupidity when someone runs into a burning building to rescue a television? What about to rescue a child? Both acts are the same – running into a burning building – it is only the goal that is different. Rescuing the child would be considered by many (if both rescuer and child survive) to be courageous, but rescuing the television (even if both rescuer and television survive) to be sheer stupidity.
To be efficient one needs to develop skill. This is an art form in itself. It can be relatively easy to learn something, but to develop skill takes practice. There is an Eastern game of strategy called Go. The basics of this can be taught in minutes, but to truly master it can take a lifetime.
One way of looking at skill is that it is a mixture of knowledge of many different ways, complemented by the experience to know which one to use and when. When this type of skill is applied to life in general, it is often called "Wisdom". To me wisdom does not automatically come with age, it comes with experience and the ability to learn from those experiences.
I also do not hold much store by “luck”. To me luck is simply when opportunity meets planning. Sometimes that planning can be done in real-time, but more often it is a case of having done at least some of the planning in advance. People who are “lucky” often just have the skill to manipulate events towards a scenario that they have already planned.
Determination is having the ability to see the fight through to the end. Not giving up when the going gets tough (or in the case of smoking, still giving up when the going gets tough!). As battles get drawn out over time, it becomes all too tempting to just give and say that it was not worth it. In some cases this is true, the goal is not worth the effort and stopping the battle and doing something more worthwhile is actually the sensible thing to do. There are other cases, however, when the end result is worth it and we should carry on.
There will also be many times that obstacles are thrown in our way. Determination can go a long way towards enabling us to overcome these. In my rock-climbing days, we used to have one member of the party who was not as skilled as many of the others in the team. One thing he had an abundance of, however, was determination. Many were the times that he managed to get to the summit of a climb on nothing more than single-mindedness. The standard comment was that he could climb a wall of plate glass – if only because he would carry on until he did. As a side note – by the time I left that group, he had also become one of the best climbers there.
Determination should, however, not be blind. There needs to be a constant re-evaluation of the situation, if only to see if it is sensible to continue. There are times when the obstacle is just too large to overcome. If one form of strategy is constantly defeated, then perhaps retreating and trying a different form of attack would be better. Perhaps the means of overcoming the obstacle cannot be justified.
So what has any of this to do with Rites of Passage? Actually, rather a lot. It is a rare person indeed that is touched by the warrior spirit and is not changed in some way by it.
Some battles are small, such as convincing the computer that it is not as intelligent as it would like to think such as stopping it from ‘correcting’ what we type. Some battles are massive and require the co-ordinated efforts of countless people – such as maintaining this planet in a way that it will support human life (the planet will survive whatever we do to her, but we may not survive the process!). All battles leave a trace behind, and it is the sum of these traces that helps make us who we are.