Men need a dragon to slay.
That’s how we’re built. Give a man something real to fight for, like his family, his work, a problem nobody else can solve, or someone who needs protecting, and he comes alive. He’ll get up early, stay late, and carry more than you’d think one person could.
Take the dragon away, and something goes wrong. If a man doesn’t have a dragon, he’ll make one up, and almost all of the made-up ones are bad.
Some of them are easy to spot. He picks fights that don’t matter. He finds an enemy online and spends his evenings at war with strangers. He turns his wife or his kids into the problem to be solved.
Others look respectable. A man can make a dragon out of his job, his net worth, a big, clean house, a perfect lawn, staying on top of every headline, or his to-do list. People call that drive.
The most common made-up dragon I see is hurry.
We invent urgency because it feels like a fight we can win. The inbox, the deadline, the next thing, and the thing after that. If we’re busy, we must be doing something important. Nobody ever answers “How are you doing?” with “Man, I’ve got way too much free time.”
It’s always “busy.” We wear it like a badge.
The trouble with a made-up dragon is that you never actually slay it. The inbox fills back up. There’s always another deadline. There’s always someone with a better house or car (neither of which matters, AT ALL). So you keep swinging, and the people around you learn to stay out of the way.
The storm
All men have a raging storm inside.
By that I mean the restlessness that won’t let you sit still, the frustration that’s out of proportion to whatever set it off, and the pressure to provide, fix, and win that follows you home from work. For some men, it comes out as anger. For a lot of us, it just comes out as being short with the people we love most.
I think it’s the same thing that makes us need a dragon in the first place. Pointed at something real, that energy builds things and protects people, but with nothing to do, it turns on whatever’s closest.
None of that gives a man permission to let it loose on his family. It’s his to deal with.
I don’t know why it’s there. I’ve often wished it wasn’t true. It’s there anyway, and it’s hardest to handle when we’re physically weak: tired, sick, hurting, or running on no sleep.
I’m writing about men because I am one, and because that’s who I’ve been talking to lately. Women have their own storms. I’ll leave those to someone who knows them better.
Hurry feeds that storm. It gives it something to do.
Ruthlessly eliminate it
I gave a talk at a men’s retreat a couple of weeks ago, built around a story from John Ortberg’s book Soul Keeping.
Ortberg was a pastor running hard, and he called his mentor, Dallas Willard, to ask what he needed to do to be spiritually healthy. Willard paused and gave him one sentence:
“You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”
Ortberg asked what else. Willard said, “There is nothing else.”
The thing everyone noticed about Willard was how unhurried he was. Somebody once said, “I’d like to live in his time zone.” Ortberg wrote that when he sat with him, he could feel his own heart rate slow down to match. Lots of other people said the same thing happened to them.
Peace is contagious, and so is hurry. When I come home wound up, everybody in my house knows it before I set my keys down. My hurry becomes their hurry.
Why hurry is the enemy
Hurry keeps everything shallow.
You can’t go deep fast. You can’t have a deep marriage in five-minute pieces between notifications.
It’s also hard to stop. There’s outside pressure, and there’s the inner drive most men have to perform. You’re not allowed to sit under a tree and read a book. That’s considered lazy.
I don’t buy it. Jesus got more done in three years than any of us will in a lifetime, and you never once see him in a hurry. Crowds pulling at him, friends arguing, people trying to kill him, and he’s never rushed. He went off alone to pray before dawn, even when everyone was out looking for him. If the most important person in history could do that, so can I.
Fighting the storm
There are plenty of dragons worth fighting, for your family, for your work, or for someone who needs protecting. The storm inside you is one of them, and it’s the one to fight first. Left alone, it keeps reaching for the made-up fights, and it makes you worse at the real ones.
The way you fight it feels backwards to most men. Instead of swinging harder, you slow down and ruthlessly eliminate hurry, a little at a time.
It’s a hard fight, but you can win it, and the people you love are better off when you do.
What it looks like in practice
This isn’t about quitting your job and moving to the woods. (I do sort of live in the woods, and there are certainly worse ways to live.) Willard wanted you to stop letting hurry run your soul.
A few things I’ve been trying:
- Slow your breathing first. When things get frantic, I breathe in through my nose for a count of four and out slowly for a count of six. The long exhale is what does the work. I do that five or six times and pray silently while I do it. It calms me down, and usually everyone else too.
- Be the calm one. Arguing doesn’t calm anyone down. A slower heart rate gives them something to match.
- Put the phone away. At a long dinner with friends recently, I asked my wife to put my phone in her purse. Without a word, everyone else moved their phones off the table too.
If you’re married to one of us
When your husband’s storm is raging, your first instinct is probably to meet it. He’s wound up, so you get wound up, and before long the whole house is frantic.
Instead, slow your breathing on purpose. Take long, slow breaths, and pray silently. You’re changing the energy in the room, so he can match yours instead of you matching his. It sounds too simple, but it works.
Then, once you’re calm, reach out and touch him. A hand on his arm or his back is enough.
I can’t fully explain it, but there’s something about the gentle touch of a woman that quiets the storm in a man. Words and arguments bounce off when he’s in that state. A calm woman with a gentle hand gets through.
It’s often the only thing that can.
Men, don’t read this section and hand the job to your wife. It’s still your storm. She can help quiet it, but she didn’t start it, and it’s not her job to manage it every day. The breathing is for you first. If she has to calm you down every night, you’re making her fight your dragon for you.
Whose heart rate?
I ended my talk with a question.
After people spend time with you, whose heart rate do they leave with?
Somebody wanted to live in Dallas Willard’s time zone. I’d like to be the kind of man people say that about.
I’m not there yet. I am slowing down though.