Men Embrace "the Strenuous Life"

Far too many in contemporary America equate beards and flannel with "manliness," but alas, a beard and flannel shirt do not a man make.  Though both are well-suited for Paul Bunyan and his fellow lumberjacks, neither have a place in the D.C. summer heat.  And while I'm at it, I implore all these "men" to donate their jeans to their local battered women's shelter.  They don't fit you, after all.

More manly?  I leave it to you to decide.

It is the opinion of the author that manliness necessitates an embracing of challenges, both intellectual and physical.  Callused hands and broken book bindings serve as sources of pride, the scars of battles waged and won.  In the song "Mountain Man," Alabama sings of climbing mountains, skinning cats and swimming rivers, not man-scaping beards and buying flannels at Urban Outfitters. 

It is Theodore Roosevelt, who best exemplifies manliness.  Blessed with possibly a photographic memory, Roosevelt demonstrated throughout his life a tremendous capacity for intellectual study.  While President, he regaled dinner guests with stories of the Hittite Empire or engaged them in discussions of the natural world, often quoting lengthy texts from memory.  But while his bottomless intellectual capacity was evident from an early age, his physical capacities languished behind.  At age eleven, Roosevelt's father admonished him, "Theodore, you have the mind but you have not the body, and without help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should.  You must make your body.  It is hard drudgery to make one's body, but I know you will do it."  And so he did, or as Doris Kearns Goodwin writes, the name Theodore Roosevelt "became the synonym of virile health and vigor."

Over the course of his life, Roosevelt felled trees in the Maine backwoods, rounded up stray cattle in the Dakota Badlands, charged up San Juan Hill leading his Rough Riders and otherwise lived what his father called "the strenuous life."  All the while he toting his library, a book or two clenched under his arm.

Present-day America continues to deviate far from the course Roosevelt charted some hundred years ago.  We, as men, must return to living the strenuous life – challenging ourselves daily to reach new intellectual and physical heights.  It is not enough to squat the bar or skim the pages of "US Weekly," if we are capable of more.  No, the challenges must be formidable.  They must be capable of teaching us the lessons we cannot learn.

Present the mind and body with formidable challenges daily.