By Tom Robotham
The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation:… You must elect your work; you shall take what your brain can, and drop all the rest. – Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Lately, I’ve been feeling powerless. One reason, no doubt, is that I’m getting old, and I can’t help noticing that I’ve lost a lot of the physical strength that I had just a decade ago. Compounding that is a sense of fragility in the face Donald Trump’s threats to destroy Social Security—which I rely on—and to cast people like me, a journalist and professor, as an enemy of the people.
Power is relative, of course, and I’m well aware that many folks are a lot more vulnerable than I am. As a white man, I’ve never had to worry about being racially profiled by cops, and as someone with light skin, an “American” accent and an English surname, I’m not likely to be swept up by ICE under suspicion that I’m “an illegal.” For that matter, I was fortunate to receive a good education and to have a wide range of career opportunities. I feel for the minimally educated workers whose factories closed years ago and were cast aside by society.
My feeling that I’m powerless is real, nevertheless, and as I reflect on it, I recognize that it’s something I’ve felt off and on my entire life. When I was a child, as I noted in my last essay in this space, I felt that most other boys had more power than I did, due to their toughness and athletic prowess. I wanted to be like Superman—with “powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men”—but I was just a shy, scrawny kid.
As I got older, I became more comfortable in my own skin, but when I finally entered the labor market, I was forced to confront a different kind of power—not the brute force of young alpha males, but the power of bosses who held my livelihood in their hands. As a young newspaper reporter, this didn’t matter all that much because I was afforded a large degree of autonomy and was encouraged to get out of the office a lot. But when I got a job at large magazine-publishing company, I encountered the dynamics of the corporate world and observed the various ways in which people deal with power. Some of my colleagues were extremely ambitious, and craved power. (One co-worker, in fact, eventually became the company’s president.)
I never had such a desire. The idea of having power over other people held no appeal to me whatsoever. But neither did I want to spend my life as an office drone, subject to the whims of managers and fluctuations in the economy. I simply wanted power over my own life.
To a significant degree, I finally achieved that goal. At the university where I work, I have a great deal of freedom to teach what I please, within my areas of expertise, and as a freelance writer, I have the power to choose my topics and assignments. But the truth is, there will always be people in our lives who have power over us.
The question is, how do we deal with it?
One thing I try to keep in mind is something I learned years ago at the beach. The experience has become an important metaphor. My parents weren’t beach people, so I never learned as a kid how to swim in the ocean. I carried this cluelessness into adulthood, and when I’d wade into the water and a wave came, I’d try to stand my ground. I often ended up eating sand, of course, and it wasn’t until I was in my early 30s that someone told me what to do—either dive under the wave, or ride it to shore. (I know, pretty pathetic, right?)
I learned a similar lesson while training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu when I was in my early 50s. One day early on I was grappling with a 300-pound opponent and when he rolled on top of me, my instinct was to summon all my strength to try to throw him off. That wasn’t going to happen. The only hope was to look for space and an opportunity to maneuver out from under him, with the techniques I’d been taught.
I should remind myself of these lessons more often because they underscore the fact that power comes in many forms. These days, it’s the most primitive kind that gets all the attention: the power of threats from bullies; the power of the iron fist. But there’s also the kind of power harnessed by Gandhi and King. Yes, on the mortal plane, they were defeated by the power of evil. But their legacies echo through eternity.
It’s worth considering the nature of that kind of power, and what makes it possible. As I do, I return to Emerson’s essay on power, from which my epigraph for this essay is drawn.
The value of that quotation for me is that it reminds me of two important truths.
First, it’s foolish to compare ourselves to other people and to dwell on our own deficiencies in comparison. I can imagine the thrill of hitting a baseball into the upper deck of Citi Field, but it was clear early in my life I would never have that kind of power. It also became clear by early adulthood, that I would never become a leader of men, in politics or business. My task, as Emerson reminds me, is to focus on whatever is in my power to control.
The second important point is that we can only harness our God-given power if we concentrate. Alas, I have to admit that I’ve allowed too much of it to dissipate as I’ve become distracted by one thing or another. Lately, those distractions have been dangled by Trump. Don’t get me wrong: It’s essential to stay informed—and to fight. But when we get upset because he’s renamed the Gulf of Mexico or posted a photo of himself as the Pope, we’re ceding our power to him. He knows exactly what he’s doing—and how easy it is to dissipate the power of the people.
For my part, at least, I’m determined to let those provocations just wash over me—like that aforementioned wave—so that I can best focus my limited powers on what is in my control: my life’s work, and the ways in which I interact with people. In other words, to love. To borrow the title of the great Gershwin song, “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.”
