the fatigues of the day.” Yet like Theodore Roosevelt before him, he
cultivated inside this frail body an indomitable soul and a
determined mind that overcame his physical limitations.
It’s a balance that everyone aspiring to sustained inner peace
must strike. Mens sana in corpore sano—a strong mind in a strong
body. Remember, when we say that someone “showed so much
heart,” we don’t mean emotion. We mean they had tenacity and grit.
The metaphor is actually misleading if you think about it. It’s really
the spine—the backbone of body—that’s doing the work.
Young Churchill loved the written word, but, diverging from the
traditional path of a writer, he didn’t lock himself up with books in a
dusty old library. He put his body into action. Serving in or observing
three straight wars, he made his name chronicling the exploits of the
empire, first as a war correspondent in South Africa during the Boer
War, where he was taken prisoner in 1899 and barely escaped with
his life.
In 1900, he was elected to his first political office. By age thirty-
three, realizing that greatness was impossible alone, he committed
his body to another. He married his wife, Clementine, a brilliant,
calming influence who balanced out many of his worst traits. It was
one of the great marriages of the age—they called each other “Pug”
and “Cat”—marked by true affection and love. “My ability to
persuade my wife to marry me,” he said, was “quite my most brilliant
achievement.... Of course, it would have been impossible for any
ordinary man to have got through what I had to go through in peace
and war without the devoted aid of what we call, in England, one’s
better half.”
As busy and ambitious as Churchill was—as much of a pusher as
he was—he was rarely frantic and did not tolerate disorganization. It
almost ruins the fun to learn that Churchill’s infamous bons mots
and one-liners were in fact well-practiced and rehearsed. No one
knew the effort that went into them, he said, nor the effort that went
into making them look effortless. “Every night,” he said, “I try myself
by court martial to see if I have done anything effective during the
day. I don’t mean just pawing the ground—anyone can go through
the motions—but something really effective.”
barry
(Barry)
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