Finding out what's inside us

When we look inside ourselves, what do we see?

I’ll never forget what it felt like, the first time I ever trained to run a marathon. Leading up to it, the longest I’d ever run in my life was a little over six miles. (And, as you know, a marathon is twenty-six miles — plus another two-tenths of a mile, just for good measure.)

I had no idea whether or not I could do it. What I did know is that, where I was starting from, I couldn’t simply step out my front door and just go do it. From the level of fitness I was starting from, I couldn’t just lace up my shoes and expect to complete twenty-six miles — or, at least, to do it without falling down from exhaustion, long before I’d reached the finish line.

What I needed was training, over a period of months, training that allowed my body to adjust and adapt to the stresses I would put it through. Training that conditioned my physical body and my mind for what it would actually be like to experience running that far.

To teach myself that I really could do it, that I had the strength and courage inside myself to acknowledge when I felt pain, and to know that it would pass — or, if it didn’t that I could endure it and still push through. That my tendons, my bones, my muscles — and my heart and my mind — had developed the strength they needed to meet this challenge.

It’s obvious to say, but it wasn’t easy — at all. There were many times I wanted to quit. (Can I tell you how absolutely bananas it felt sometimes, to wake up at 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning for a 6:30 a.m. run in the dark, knowing I wouldn’t be done for another couple hours — especially when all my friends were still fast asleep in their beds at that hour?)

The thing is, I didn’t know I could do it. I needed to find that out, by putting one foot in front of the other, gradually proving to myself that I could run longer and longer distances, little by little, week by week. I had to prove it to myself — which is kind of a strange thing when you think about it, right?

Strange as it may be, it was a process I had to go through, a conversation with myself that took place over a number of months. And who knows, I might have ended up in a different place, if I hadn’t stuck with it? But little by little, every step took me to a place where it was possible.

Almost five years ago, during the protests that rocked the U.S. in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, I shared a story with you that inspired me as we discussed in our family what was going on in the news.

The story has been popping back in my head all this week, so I thought I’d share it with you again — it starts with a writer named Jim Collins, who’s known for his books on business like Built To Last and Good To Great.

In the latter of those books Collins tells a story of the “Stockdale paradox,” named for James Stockdale, an admiral in the U.S. Navy who was captured, tortured and imprisoned for more than seven years during the height of the Vietnam War.

Collins met Stockdale as he was writing Good to Great, in which he shares the most important lesson about the admiral’s experience:

Admiral Jim Stockdale was the highest-ranking military officer in the Hanoi Hilton. He was there for, I think, seven years, from 1968 to 1974. He was tortured over twenty times. And by his own account, Stockdale came out of the prison camp even stronger than he went in.

In preparation for a day I got to spend with Jim Stockdale, I read his book In Love and War. As I read this book, I found myself getting depressed because it seemed like his systemic constraints were so severe, and there was never going to be any end to it. His captors could come in any day and torture him. He had no sense of whether, or if, he would ever get out of the prison camp. Absolutely depressing situation. It’s like we can all survive anything as long as we know it will come to an end, we know when, and we have a sense of control. He had none of that.

Then all of a sudden it dawned on me, “Wait a minute, I’m getting depressed reading this book, and I know the end of the story. I know he gets out. I know he reunites with his family. I know he becomes a national hero. And I even know that we’re going to have lunch on the beautiful Stanford campus on Monday. How did he not let those oppressive circumstances beat him down? How did he not get depressed?” And I asked him.

He said, “Well, you have to understand, it was never depressing. Because despite all those circumstances, I never ever wavered in my absolute faith that not only would I prevail — get out of this — but I would also prevail by turning it into the defining event of my life that would make me a stronger and better person.”

You’re probably thinking to yourself, well of course we can expect a high-ranking Navy admiral to emerge from a situation like this. But a normal, ordinary person like me? How could I expect to? Me? Are you serious?!

That’s when the really fascinating part of the conversation Collins had with Stockdale caught my attention — that each of us has power and mental strength too, like what he found in himself:

A little later in the conversation, after I’d absorbed that and said nothing for about five minutes because I was just stunned, I asked him who didn’t make it out of those systemic circumstances as well as he had.

He said, “Oh, it’s easy. I can tell you who didn’t make it out. It was the optimists.”

And I said, “I’m really confused, Admiral Stockdale.”

He said, “The optimists. Yes. They were the ones who always said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ Christmas would come and it would go. And there would be another Christmas. And they died of a broken heart.”

Then he grabbed me by the shoulders and he said, “This is what I learned from those years in the prison camp, where all those constraints just were oppressive. You must never ever ever confuse, on the one hand, the need for absolute, unwavering faith that you can prevail despite those constraints with, on the other hand, the need for the discipline to begin by confronting the brutal facts, whatever they are.”

Reading those words, I can see why they might sound depressing. But actually, they’re empowering. Because nothing short of seeing reality for what it actually is, looking it right in the face, can help us move forward.

That goes for our personal health and fitness we improve through running, our overall mental health — for everything, really.

As Stockdale (who passed away in 2005) might tell us if he were alive today, it’s only by refusing to look away — by confronting the reality of what is happening with eyes wide open, that we can turn it into a defining event that can transform our lives.

When the protests were still going on back in 2020, one day my wife and daughter and I were in the car with our six-year-old son. She had been talking with him about the protests he’d seen on TV, and about racism at a level he could understand.

What was wrong, my son replied, was that people had forgotten to listen to “Martin Luther King’s rules,” as his kindergarten class had learned about King earlier that year. He understood what it meant when people to hurt one another, how wrong it is for one group to oppress another. When you do that, he said, you’re trying to “destroy someone else’s world.”

Then he said something I’ll never forget: “And when you try to destroy someone else’s world, you destroy your world.”

I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard it, but I’m telling you the absolute truth that a little boy who was then just six years old said those words. “From the mouths of children,” right?

As always, my friends, let me know how you are, how your running is going and the races and challenges you’re aiming for — and keep in touch!

Your friend,

— Terrell