Strength rejoices in the right amount of challenge

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Strength rejoices in the right amount of challenge
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Take a break | Madeline Fry

We’re nearing the end of the second full week of classes, and if you’re anything like the majority of the student body, you’re already exhausted.

This might leave you feeling somewhat peeved and more than a little abashed: How is it that you’ve just started the semester and you’re already burned out? This year has quickly proven itself to be difficult, but strength is supposed to rejoice in the challenge. Well, it’s two weeks into the challenge, and rejoicing is the last thing on your mind as you stare blankly at your planner.

So often we take our school motto—”virtus tentamine gaudet”—to indicate that proving our strength means challenging ourselves at every turn. If we’re not taking the most difficult professors, working multiple campus jobs, and tackling a leadership position in every organization we’re involved with, then we’re not doing enough. Every spare five minutes becomes an invitation to sign up for one more thing.

But perhaps it’s not pursuing the challenge for its own sake that makes us better. The trial worthy of our celebration is not the indiscriminate pummeling of our spirits but the decision not simply to face hardship but also to pause at the threshold of each new undertaking and reflect.

Our goal can’t simply be to do difficult things—that’s easy enough. We go to a vibrant, demanding school with many challenges to offer. We have to choose those that will best direct us toward something higher, a goal specific to each of us.

Psychologist and author Angela Lee Duckworth calls the concept of doggedly pursuing our goals, a very Hillsdalian ethos, “grit.” This has been a buzzword in business and education since she introduced it in her 2013 TED Talk. Grit, she says, is “passion and perseverance for very long-term goals.”

Grit, strength in the face of hardship, is often essential to success, but this single-minded mindset can also prevent us from recognizing some obstacles as legitimate warnings. When the going gets tough, sometimes the tough don’t get going—they give up.  And that’s okay. If your schedule leaves you feeling burned out, exhausted, and unhappy, that’s not a sign of weakness. That’s your brain telling you to slow down, probably for good reason.

Associate Dean of Women Rebekah Dell told resident assistants during training this year that as a rule of thumb, people can only handle five major commitments. If you’re a student, academics is one. If you have friends (which, presumably, you do), relationships is another. That leaves you with only three things to commit to. Add a job, volunteering, and an extracurricular, and you’re already at five.

Choosing to drop one challenge so you can succeed in the others does not constitute failure. Think about which commitments are going to help you grow the most as a person in the ways that are unique to you, and pursue them. Only you know what that looks like. To compare yourself to busier students or to hold yourself to another’s standard is to do yourself a dangerous disservice.

It’s early enough in the semester to set the pace for the next three months and decide what you would like to achieve and who you would like to be by December. Are you really embracing the challenge by being stressed and sleep deprived? You may be closing yourself off to all that you could accomplish well, if you only tried to accomplish less.

Strength does not jump at every opportunity to be tested. It knows when to pause, to wait, to recover so when it is ready to prove itself, it may succeed. One of the truest marks of maturity is to respect your own boundaries, to know when to charge on and when to rest.

And mastering that is a challenge worth celebrating.

Fry is a junior studying French and journalism.