If you are a man you should be a student of masculinity; only by studying true manhood, true masculinity, can you acquire the understanding to improve yourself. One of the core missions of life on Earth is self-improvement. Not for selfish egotistical reasons, but because the more that we improve ourselves, the more we can help others. That’s why it is actually selfless to work on ourselves. Think about it. Suppose you were a firefighter. Would you be more likely to save someone’s life if you spent a ton of time working on your firefighter skills, or if you didn’t?
I have been lucky enough to be able to read the entire Little House series of books, (which takes place in the late 1800s), by Laura Ingalls Wilder, to both of my daughters. They have gotten a thrill out of hearing about the frontier adventures of Laura and her sisters, and I have had the benefit of studying a great example of an archetypal man, their father, Charles Ingalls.
Charles had a great combination of artistic, physical, and spiritual gifts. He could sing, dance, play the fiddle, and read poetry. He could kill a bear, butcher a hog, survive three days buried in a snowbank while a blizzard raged overhead, plow a field, drive a team of horses, build a house from wildcrafted materials, catch fish, run a trap-line, and navigate a trackless wilderness. He could be firm when the situation called for firmness, and gentle when the situation called for gentleness. He could take seriously the worship of God, and give whatever he had to make someone else happy.
One of the core values of being a man is self-sacrifice. Just look at the example of Jesus Christ. He sacrificed his life for the sake of humanity. Every father must do the same, in a smaller way; sacrifice part of himself to provide for his family. On a selfish level, Charles probably would have been happier to spend his days carefree, wandering the frontier, hunting and fishing. Instead, he spent the spent the better part of his time working the fields from dawn till dusk, six days a week. It was a harder life, but it provided for his family, and that is a truer happiness.
I think that men in those days would go to much greater lengths to provide for their families than those of us in the more coddled stations of contemporary life could readily imagine. One year in Minnesota, his wheat crop was destroyed by a plague of grasshoppers, so Charles walked 200 miles (each way) to find work on a farm that hadn’t been ravaged, to earn enough money to buy food for the winter.
A man needs to know when to hold fast and when to be flexible. The Ingalls family had fallen into debt, due to several years of bad crops, and a terrible bout of scarlet fever, which had left Laura’s elder sister blind. Charles decided that the best course of action was to sell their land to pay off debts, and take a railroad job further west. His wife, Caroline was against the move, because they had already invested so much labor in getting established where they were. But Charles held firm. They moved, and it turned out to be the right decision. After a few years in Dakota Territory, Charles started to get antsy, and he wanted to go west again. Again Caroline was against it, because they had stability where they were, and access to a school and a town. This time, Charles could see that there was no compelling reason to move - it was just his innate urge to go west talking. So he checked his own desires, and they stayed.
A man must be able to stay cheerful even in the midst of disaster. He must be able to lend strength to those around him whenever necessary. One year in South Dakota the family faced a brutally hard winter. A long string of back to back blizzards shut down the railroad, and no supplies could get in. The Ingallses, along with most other people in town, ran dangerously low on food. Coal and firewood also ran out, and they were reduced to burning hay to keep from freezing to death. Each day, for months on end, was a non-stop endless routine of twisting hay into little sticks to feed the fire, and grinding what little grain they had into flour in a small coffee mill to make their daily loaf of bread, which was their only food. Laura relates how many times that winter, utter despair threatened to overtake the family, but each time Pa would find a way to cheer them up enough to continue on.
When I think about the nature of the true masculine, or the archetypal masculine, probably the first thing that comes to mind is how far short of the mark I have fallen. But another trait of the masculine is he doesn’t give up, no matter the magnitude of his past mistakes. Charles made a grave error in judgement which led to him getting lost in a blizzard and then buried in a snow bank. He knew he had erred, but he did not give up. He curled up in his coat, gradually ate what little bit of food he had, and waited for the storm to pass. When it finally did, three days later, he dug his way out and staggered home.
Postscript:
I believe that the true feminine is equally as important as the true masculine, but I haven’t talked about it in this post, because I don’t have any first-hand knowledge of it, at least not in this lifetime.
I know that there are some racist elements I the Little House books. I have decided not to let them deter me from learning the many positive lessons that can be learned from this series, because racism wasn’t generally understood as wrong then. Now we do understand that it is wrong, and I totally advocate for the view that it is wrong. But that kind of understanding was extremely rare when these events took place, so personally I can’t condemn them, as I would condemn them if they were coming from someone in the present time.