Character is Destiny

“Character is Destiny.”

-          Heraclitus (535 BCE – 475 BCE)

 

 

 

 

 

I don’t know about you, but as ancient Greek proverbs go that is one of my all-time favorites.

Okay, I really don’t know many other ancient proverbs, and I came across this one in a Clint Eastwood biography, of all things, but I believe my point still stands – this is a good thought to fall back on in the course of our day-to-day struggles at work, at home, and with life in general.
 

Why?
 

In three short words it offers rare reassurance to every one of us who deals from time to time with elements seemingly out of our control. It says that one’s fortune can and will be determined more by who we are on the inside than how we appear to be on the outside. It also serves as a model of conduct – do the right thing and your future will be assured – that is as good, if not better, than anything a CEO or best-selling self-help guru could come up with on his or her best day.
 

Don’t let the lofty ideas throw you off. Character, while not easy to pin down in so many words, is real, no matter what the era; and destiny is not something reserved only for the rich and famous.

Case in point – in the early 1900s a young woman named Margaret was growing up on a small farm in the rural township of Irving, Wisconsin. The daughter of Norwegian immigrants, she, like countless other girls of that time, held on to simple dreams: find a good man, fall in love and raise a family. Most likely this would mean a hard but stable life working on a farm. In those days this was a calling of the highest honor.
 

Margaret did indeed meet a good man, and in 1919, at the age of twenty-five, she married Adolph Thompson, a native North Dakotan nine years her senior. Together they took over his family’s small dairy farm in Wisconsin and welcomed the arrival of two daughters in the next three years. Everything was playing out just as she had always hoped and prayed it would.
 

But that wouldn’t last.
 

The first heartache came in 1923 when her third child, a boy, was born with a congenital digestive disorder that basically made it more and more difficult for him to digest any food. It might well have been what is known today as esophageal achalasia, a rare and potentially deadly affliction that can occur in very young children. But back then no such diagnosis, let alone cure, was known. Certainly home remedies and prayer vigils were not enough. Even doctors at the nearest county hospital in Marshfield were powerless to save him. Margaret could only watch as her son, Adolph Harvey Thompson, grew weaker by the day until finally his body gave out and he starved to death. He was four-months-old.
 

(Incredibly this wasn’t the first time Margaret experienced such grief. Twenty years earlier her younger sister, Gina, died when she too was only four-months-old, purportedly from malnutrition due to another digestive ailment.)

Then in 1937 Margaret’s husband suffered a crippling stroke that left him so weak as to be unable to do any more work on the farm. He struggled with life from then on, dying in 1946. Through it all Margaret and the children soldiered on as best they could and somehow kept the farm going.
 

A decade or so later the next calamity struck when she was diagnosed with breast cancer and ended up undergoing a radical mastectomy, the pain and scars of which would doubtless make any patient or oncologist cringe today. Still she raised her family of five children without complaint or compromise, and never gave up or stopped caring when it would have been damn easy to do just that.
 

Yet all I knew about her until later in my own life was that Margaret Thompson was my maternal grandmother, a sweet, smiling woman who always seemed to me as fine and delicate as a porcelain doll.
 

So whether you know it or not, someone in your family’s past most likely struggled more than you will ever know, and thanks in no small part to their perseverance you are now reading this.
 

Next time things aren’t exactly going your way and you think you’ve got it rough…well, think again. And trust that you are never really alone in this life because somewhere along the line you have character firmly on your side.

 

 

 

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