Put Down Your Seax And Pick Up Your Heart: The Real Meaning of a Warrior Mentality (Part Four)
I advise you, Dragon-Clown,
To take my advice:
It will benefit you if you can fully understand it;
Good will come to you if you can fully catch its meaning.
Do not look up while in the heat of battle–
People are too easily driven mad–
Unless it is to raise the spirits of the men around you.–Havamal 129, Translation Mine
(As featured in the Loddfafnismal in the Chapter: Finding Odin, Norse Witch: Reclaiming the Heidhrinn Heart by Connla Freyjason)
In the last three blog posts, we explored how mindfulness, devotion, and self-control coupled with selflessness form three of the four cornerstones of a true modern warrior mentality. Today, we bring all three of those concepts together as we explore the final, fourth key: focus in community.
In the passage from the Havamal which we are exploring today, many would-be warriors place primary focus on these two lines:
Do not look up while in the heat of battle–
People are too easily driven mad–
Rather than on the line that follows:
Unless it is to raise the spirits of the men around you.
However, when we think of actual warriors from the past, which ones do we genuinely respect? Which ones do we actually wish to emulate? The ones who kept their heads down because they feared going mad, and, therefore, did not assist the community around them, or the ones who focused on that community, to the degree that they put their own welfare at risk?
Keeping your head down maintains an “all about me” mentality. Too many people nowadays live their lives like they’re trapped in a Carly Simon song. Newsflash: not everything is all about you! When you keep your head down, constantly looking out for only your own interests, you miss the bigger picture of the world outside, and that is a world that, believe it or not, needs you. As the poet John Donne wrote in 1624:
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Of course, Donne focused on men in Europe, because that was where he was writing from at the time, but this applies to everyone: man or woman, European, or American, or From Wherever, and no matter the color of your skin. Every human’s death should diminish you, and every human’s life should be on your personal radar, because you should be involved in mankind! And if you are not thus involved, then you are not a true warrior; you’re only posturing and paying lip service to that ideal.
The true warrior is anything but “all about me”. As we discussed in the last blog post, attitude is everything. Going through life with an “all about me” attitude casts everyone else as the enemy: we can either choose to go at life looking for the worst in people and expecting violence at every turn, or we can realize that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The true warrior understands that combat has an ebb and flow, which sometimes demands being the opponent, and sometimes being the defender. Yourself should not be the only person you’re willing to actively defend! Again: ours is a Tradition that celebrates a gift for a gift; how much better might our lives be, if we lived them that way, rather than exchanging blow for blow? The blow for blow mentality sets up a sort of “Pavlov’s response”, wherein we naturally seek to be stronger, tougher, and more mercenary than our opponent, and in the end, everybody winds up becoming an opponent. Instead, the true warrior looks around, finds where they are most needed, asks “how can I help?“, and then is fully present and involved in that helping.
When everything is “all about me”, the “me” in question winds up incredibly lonely. Think about people you may know in your life. Doubtless, there is at least one person who constantly talks only about him or her self. No matter what the conversation originally was about, somehow, they’ll find a way to turn it back to them and their life. When you post derogatory things on Facebook, this person may somehow always turn it into a firestorm because they automatically assume whatever you said was about them, too, and, therefore, take it as a focused attack, when indeed, it was anything but that. Do you genuinely enjoy this person’s company? Chances are, the honest answer to that question is an emphatic no. Such an “all about me” attitude pushes people away. Nobody wants to have to deal with that level of drama llama, do they? As my “hostess” has recently coined:
Why be a drama llama when you can be a party llama instead? ~Michelle Iacona
The “all about me” attitude actively breeds drama. But what does it mean to be a “party llama” instead? Instead of being “all about me”, the “party llama” looks around at the world, and at other people, and says “here, let me celebrate you!”, and then actively celebrates other people. In other words, they fight to uplift.
Uplifting others builds community. If you’re lucky, you probably also have at least one person in your life that, no matter how sucky the day is, can turn it around in an instant by their heartfelt words of encouragement and their genuine celebration not only of you, but of individuality in general. I am super-blessed in this department, because I married such a person, and I also have several dear friends who are this type of person. Look at these types of people: what do you notice about the patterns of their lives, versus the patterns of life for the “all about me” people? People tend to be drawn to these “party llamas”, don’t they? Communities build up around them, right? That’s because when we reach out and actively work to make the world better, we become beacons, and, just as if we were human lighthouses, we draw other “ships” (other people) safely to our “shore” (companionship; community). Such people often become leaders, without even actively trying.
Community is necessary for life. Like it or not, humans are herd animals or pack animals, just like horses or coyotes or wolves. This can be a good thing, or a bad thing, depending on who is actively leading said community. This human “herd mentality” can lead to things like mob violence and modern witch hunts, or it can lead to true community. In saying that, I’m not talking about some la-la, pseudo-communist, tree-hugging newtopia where everybody cuddles fluffy bunnies and gets along. What I am talking about is an interconnectedness which recognizes the ideals put forth in that Donne poem back there. I’m talking about being involved in humankind. Being truly involved means erasing us versus them mentalities and either/or dichotomies, in favor of both/and. Too many would-be warriors view the erasure of that us versus them mentality as “fluffy bunny”, and they want nothing to do with it. Those attitudes actively lead to the breakdown of community, rather than building it. And whether we like it or not, community really is as necessary for our lives here in the modern world as it was in the ancient world of our Ancestors, regardless of whether our actual blood Ancestors hailed from the Scandinavian coast or Hong Kong’s beautiful bay, or the shores of West Africa. Without community, we descend into a dog-eat-dog, back-biting miasma bent on confrontation and destruction, and that is how societies die. Without community, we are literally signing ourselves up for extinction.
Bruce Lee, perhaps one of the greatest possible role models for the modern warrior, said:
The warrior is the average man with laser-like focus.
Notice that there is zero vocabulary in that definition about wielding a weapon, or violence. What makes a person a true warrior is where they put their focus in life. Sure, you can choose to put all of your focus on turning everyone else in the world into an opponent, and constantly having to be on both the defensive and offensive at the same time, but we have a word for those people, too, and it’s not warrior. It’s bully, tyrant, war-monger, and a host of other nasty nouns that lead to sucktastic things. Or, you can choose to focus on being a hero: someone who puts down their weapons, and picks up their heart. It’s pretty much impossible to become a hero in a vaccuum: warriors are defined as heroes by their community. And down through the Ages, such proclamations have been governed not by the size of a dude’s seax, or even how well he might have wielded it, or how many people he felled with it, but by the people he helped along the way.
