OPINION: 'You don't give a man a weapon until you've taught him how to dance'

There is an old Irish saying: “You don’t give a man a weapon until you’ve taught him how to dance.”

In other words, a different kind of learning is required before someone can be truly trusted with social power and potent things like weapons.

What do we learn when we dance? We learn to connect with others, to move in concert with them, to understand their rhythms and how they hear the music.

We learn to work in tandem and we learn to feel unbridled joy in the company of others. We learn to live in the moment because that’s what the dance is, the moment fully engaged.

No one is looking to the end of the dance, they just want to enjoy it as it happens. In this metaphor, until we learn to dance, we can’t really know ourselves or know anyone else.

If a person doesn’t know the wounds of their own soul, they can do more than be blind to their own suffering, they can be blind to the suffering of others.

They may even visit their own suffering on to others, projecting their suffering outside themselves. This may be the only way for them to cope with the suffering that scalds them, inflicting it, pouring it into someone else, burning them too, in the form of verbal and emotional abuse or actual physical violence.

So in the old way, in order to responsibly carry a sword or weapon of any kind, a person must first become disarmed, vulnerable and connected to something meaningful and supportive of the joy of life.

They must learn to feel the rhythm of the interconnectedness of all people and need to know the content of their own souls before they can be trusted with the power to enter another’s life in a way that could affect it.

In ancient times then, forging the temperament of young men took precedence over the idea of simply giving them weapons at a certain age.

They knew that when a smith forges a blade he must balance making its body flexible with making its edge hard and sharp. If the blade is too hard it will be brittle and break on impact yet if it’s too flexible it won’t be hard enough to have a cutting edge.

Tempering is the process of heating the blade to a high heat and cooling it slowly until it settles into a metal that’s both flexible and hard enough to sharpen and whose internal stresses have been removed.

The tempering of a person’s soul means putting it in the fire of discovery to learn what stresses or triggers it might carry and learning at what point they turn into instinctive reaction.

Becoming tempered also means revisiting and fully knowing every stress experience and every trauma of one’s life, letting it cool slowly, and by so doing, learn empathy, for oneself first and then learning the ability to feel the suffering of another with a desire not to exploit that suffering, but to alleviate it, because the pain is understood and shared.

We have to begin to look at the young men and women in generations still in the crucible. What kind of mettle will they display?

What kind of forging will they experience? If left to society, they will become hard, sharp, unyielding and brittle, capable of much violence, both emotional and physical, but they will break easily on impact with life because they have no tempering.

There will be no heat to discover their flaws, their triggers and stresses, there will be no internal quest to find their flaws and no time spent cooling those flaws until they fade away, understood completely through the empathy gained by the process of the inward journey to themselves. They will understand only the polish of the shiny blade and the excitement of its sharpness, not realising that if tested it will fail.

It’s there, in how and what we extole, teach and applaud, that we show the next generation what to emulate and imitate and then we moan and complain that they do, that they follow the influencers, swim in the shallows and can’t have the strength of character to be individuals.

It’s up to us, the hammer and anvil in the hands of the watchful smith, to impart empathy, to give them time and space and the means to look inside.

We do this by talking to them, by challenging their beliefs, opinions and actions. We heat them up to find out where the triggers are and help them see how to turn those weaknesses into strength by understanding why they happen and how to respond rather than react.

We teach them the dance, the way and rhythm of humanity and how to hear the music and move in time with it. We teach them to see others as partners in the dance too, rather than someone trying to steal their limelight.

We teach them to see, not by telling them what’s there as we see it, but by asking them what they see and pointing out what they miss.

We take what they know and we add to it, in a way that lets them keep who they are while learning what we came to know.

We also have to teach them to do the right thing, listening to their conscience even when there’s no one watching. We have to teach them to regulate themselves in a way that makes them want to be the best version of themselves.

This is how we gain true immortality.

We impart the best of ourselves and see it carry onward.

The admonition is implied also, that if we do any less than this, we will, by not tempering their souls, impart the very parts of ourselves that will make them weaker, more reactive, less able to see themselves and how can we ever trust them then, to carry a sword and the potential damage it could do?

Learning to accept oneself, to become aware of one’s own triggers and to examine them in a way that melts them away, leads us to another saying: “That cooler heads prevail”.

Hotheads, reactive, triggered, easily angered people are those who haven’t resolved their own triggers, made peace with their traumas and who will behave without empathy.

If we are to teach our children anything, empathy must be paramount amongst them, and with empathy, Acceptance.