Men's Retreat

I don't know who these guys are - it seems like there's a religious element to their men's weekend, which is not true of the Mankind Project - but I really appreciate this short piece. It's hard to figure out how to talk about these retreats... because on one hand, it's deadly serious, but on the other, it's a hell of a lot of fun.

It's telling to me that one of the great criticisms of our time is, "he takes himself too seriously." Seriousness and emotional vulnerability are a potent combination - most of the seriousness we get these days is filtered (and made socially acceptable) through anger and/or intellect, by politicians, academics and the media.

Emotionally vulnerable seriousness is a rarer sight - though it's making an unfortunate comeback in the popularity of Glenn Beck, on Fox News. People seem to really respond to the fact that he's willing to cry openly on national television - which would be a very positive development for our society, I think, if he weren't completely insane.

In this day and age, it's socially acceptable to avoid seriousness at all costs, especially by employing irony (I'm looking at my generation, here). Seriousness is a bummer, and it's much easier to make light of difficult situations than it is to let down my defenses and really feel what I need to feel. In talking about Men's Work, the conversation tends to quickly turn to men drumming around fires in the woods - so I'm experimenting with different ways of talking about it, acknowledging the drumming-around-fires element and letting that part be silly, if it needs to be silly, in service of the larger point about the importance of this work.

Employing Braveheart and Mel, against his will, though, is a masterful bit of macho marketing jujitsu. Because hell yeah, I responded emotionally to that (Oscar-winning) movie when it came out, sometime during my teens. Mel Gibson brilliantly managed to tap into something really potent in the zeitgeist of the mid-90s... before he, too, went insane.

I get it - humor is a great way to approach scary things, like, say, sharing deep truths about your childhood and your family with a bunch of strangers. But the danger, in my experience, is that it's easy to forget how to get serious, when it's time to get serious. Unless you practice. And that's a big part of what these weekends are about.