The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

by John Lovell

Underneath all these expectations, I believe there is something deep and true tugging at the heart of every man, something that keeps us up at night and wakes us early in the morning. It gnaws at our souls, taunting us with thoughts and images of what we might become. Maybe you feel it, too, this sacred call to your potential. I’m not talking about amping up your productivity or applying clever tricks from self-help books. I’m talking about actually being better. If the dormant parts of you and me came fully awake, imagine the lives that would benefit—those of our wives and children, as well as our coworkers and community members, even our friends. The impact could write a legacy for generations to come. If you’ve ever considered this question of what you could be, your soul probably aches at the thought. It might seem all but impossible to achieve, because no matter how hard you try, you just can’t seem to get it right. This sense of not-right-ness can bring with it feelings of shame and failure, and those never seem to go away. Such pressure can crush a man. But this is not where the story ends. Men were meant for more. And yet, everywhere we look, we are being asked to be less. As society tempts us with pleasure, comfort, and security, we can be quietly lulled into passivity, giving up the fight for what we know to be right. We do this because it is easy—for now. Like the biblical Esau, we exchange our birthright for a temporary meal, surrendering the fight of our lives...

But shouldn’t we be teaching our boys to trust their instincts and fight for what’s right? Shouldn’t young men everywhere be encouraged to question immoral authority and search for truth beyond what is socially acceptable? Should we not expect men to challenge evil, embrace what is good, and fight to protect it? In other words, shouldn’t we be ready to rock the boat and stand unflinchingly against a world gone wrong?

To be a good man, you must become a paradox: strong but self-controlled, violent but gentle, ready to go to war one minute and prepared to give piggyback rides the next. This kind of man is fierce in word and deed while remaining compassionate and humble. He is fully soldier, fully lover, whole man.

Before they’re out of diapers, boys are preparing for battle. This is a natural and normal impulse. If you give both a boy and a girl a Barbie doll, you would not be surprised to see the girl dressing the doll in pretty clothes and playing princess. The boy, on the other hand, will hold the legs in one hand, push the upper body back at a 90-degree angle and pretend the Barbie is a gun. Then, he’ll point the gun at someone and shoot. An hour later, the doll will be missing a leg with the head turned around backward. Sure, there are exceptions to the rule, but I’m not talking about outliers. I’m talking about the rule of what’s at the heart of true masculinity, which is to protect and defend.

It seems today we’ve lost this understanding; the importance of having warriors in the world. Sure, we still see superheroes in comic books and movies, as well as occasional astronauts and cowboys as objects of respect and reverence. But this is far different from growing up with Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong. Where are the real men today who possess rugged strength and who commit to bold action? When did we start expecting so little? Maybe this kind of man seems mythological at best, but I assure you that such men still exist. There are men who will still stand up for what is right and who aren’t afraid to use their strength. We used to require this of them; now it surprises us. If we want to have any hope for the future, though, we must return to such an expectation.

First off, dangerous men are tougher than a two-dollar steak. (I’ve always wanted to work that phrase into a piece of writing.)This is not just tough-as-nails physical strength we’re talking about but a mental and emotional grit. They’d rather die than quit, which is asinine but true. They don’t complain much, seemingly impervious to discomfort. They live disciplined lives and can endure all kinds of pain without showing weakness. Of course, they still experience pain but have learned to bear it with a smile. These men have graveyard humor—they can laugh in the face of death—which itself is evidence of mental toughness. They can laugh at loss, not taking themselves too seriously or feeling too intimidated by risk.

It teaches us flexibility in regard to the things we cannot control. Consider the difference between the branches of an oak tree, which will shatter into smithereens given enough wind, ice, and time; then contrast that with the limberness of a willow, which moves with the wind. The willow is no less strong but instead of refusing to bend until it breaks, it flexes with the wind. That’s graveyard humor—a willingness to move with the challenges of life, even with death itself, and not take things so seriously.

As you write these words, take note of how you feel and what it does to your perspective. Say your final words on those pages, seal them up, then tell someone where to find them if something happens to you. Before you can live fully, you have to face death, and writing this letter is a great way to sort out what your priorities are. It’s time to live like you are dying.

The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools. —THUCYDIDES

Let’s have their employer add their paycheck up wrong and see how quickly they can add two and two to make four.

“The final weapon is the brain, all else is supplemental.”

Cool was out, and Winning was in.

SHE IS NO SWAN Some mistook her for a swan. An awkward youth that, Almost overnight, Shed drab feathers And burst upon sleepy waters In an unexpectant dazzle of white. But I know she is no swan. Now elegance IS hers. Beauty, no question. But I, who know her best, Can tell you surely, She is a dragon. She hid herself from a graying world Where none could seek her out. There is beauty in her movement. There is hot passion in her chest. And she—a powerful spirit slumbering, held treasure in her coils. It was I who ventured for her. I was carried, spellbound after As she, my great quest, beckoned. But at last in finding a fragile swan, In waking transformed into a fearful form. And she smiled and met my gaze As sleep fell from her eyes. We faced each other, transfixed. I, a conqueror. Her, the never conquered. “Am I worthy?” I asked myself As my hands trembled And my legs went weak. But I set my eyes and dared to try. Sensing this, the dragon inched closer, And I saw past dread to a fearful delight. She smiled back. Dumbstruck, I dropped my shield. My armor fell beside it. My sword I tossed behind me. And, moving closer still, she paused, To draw my last and first breath. I raised my hands high. As her fire scorched my bones . . . that I might burn for her, Forever. —john lovell

What we need is balance, and this is created by a different kind of strength than we are accustomed to. Just like I had to learn the frustrating process of training my feet to do the one, two, rock-step, I have had to harness both my physical and mental strength to dance through life. It’s not easy, nor is it always pretty; but this is how you eventually learn to navigate life without breaking anything or anyone (or at least minimizing the damage).

“One is given strength to bear what happens to one, but not the one hundred and one different things that might happen.”

Most men have more to give and they settle for too little. If you are the type of guy who is apathetic, unmotivated, and living anything resembling a sedentary lifestyle, you don’t need to know your limits so you can stop exceeding them. You need to put your nose down and work harder. This kind of man is tired not because he’s doing too much but because he’s doing too little.

When you vicariously live through the heroes on your screens and get your taste of victory from a favorite sports team, your ambition is being robbed. These time-wasting and passion-sucking activities can leave you an unmotivated shell of a man who has spent his vitality on cheap counterfeits. You’ve been robbed of your greatest resource, and it’s time to steal it back. Replace your bad habits with good ones. Put down the unhealthy snacks and pick up some weights. Go pursue your wife even if she’s mad at you (especially then). Stop collecting digital accolades in cyberspace and find some real value. Parasites are taking your passions and leaving you empty. We have to cut them out before the cancer infects the whole body.

Perhaps, a lack of motivation is not your problem. Maybe, like me, you don’t know your own limits and often push yourself too hard. This is equally dangerous. Again, our ideal here is balance, not perfection. The goal is to move through the world well, responding calmly to all kinds of chaos as it comes. As we build back up our ambition, reclaiming what we’ve likely given away to all kinds of unworthy forces, we need to know and respect our limits. You cannot live up to everyone’s expectations and meet everyone’s needs. You just can’t. If you gave work everything it would like to demand of you, it would keep demanding more until it had taken every shred of your attention from all other areas of life. Consider that your boss will always want a little more tomorrow based on what you can deliver today. That’s just the nature of work. But you can easily dig yourself an early grave if you don’t know your limits. Be careful here; many men give too much to work and deprive the rest of their lives as a result.

Maybe you’re stuck trying to please a father who was never satisfied, not because you’re not good enough but because his expectations were unrealistic. That’s not your fault, but it becomes your responsibility if you don’t know what you are capable of.

Setting boundaries is harder work than we’d sometimes like to admit. You have to be content with your output, even when others say it isn’t enough. One of the greatest fears a man has is not measuring up, that what he has to offer the world is simply not enough. Women, too, struggle with this but often when it comes to their appearance and how they are accepted. Men’s struggle with feeling insufficient tends to come down to their strength and performance. This nagging feeling of “not enough” can lead us into all kinds of dangerous situations, if we’re not careful.

John blows into town one day and turns our college world upside down. Riding a Harley, sporting a full and threatening beard, it was immediately obvious he was a man fresh from war. The guys wanted to be him (including my then boyfriend). The girls wanted to date him (except me!). And he quickly became what seemed like the center of our big group of friends. Whenever we’d go out to eat, he’d buy everyone’s meal. Whenever we wanted to meet up, he’d invite everyone to his home—that he owned. He was head-and-shoulders above us in life experience and still paid us the compliment of wanting to be friends. What he lacked in experience, he found in assimilating into our group of friends, eventually smoothing out the edges of his Ranger sense of humor.

College John still had his flaws, including occasionally making girls cry with his straightforwardness and wearing all one color—like a beige T-shirt with khaki shorts and Birkenstocks. All. One. Color.

Another priority is my marriage. You really have to nail this. No “happily ever after” happens accidentally, and I’ve learned that you’ve got to pour lots of time and intentionality into any important relationship, especially when it comes to a spouse. Your intimate relationships affect you at the deepest level and ripple out into every other area, so you don’t want to screw this up. It takes daily focus to make a marriage work, and without it the relationship will die.

The soldier who doesn’t have a new cause to fight for is going to start drifting, and purposelessness is death to the masculine soul. A lot of wartime trauma is at least exacerbated if not caused by a man’s inability to find a new purpose.

When a soldier doesn’t fully reintegrate into society, he cuts himself off from those who would support him. He needs a new mission and a team. Yes, there will be those who are bad eggs, even in the civilian world, those who are soft and weak and even despicable. But these people can still teach you things. The weak ones in your life are simply weak in ways you are not. What the soldier fails to appreciate is those same civilians may be stronger in ways that he doesn’t yet fully understand. You have a lot to learn from these so-called normal people, and it would do you well to get off your high horse. When I speak of “soldiers,” I’m not talking about just those who have left an actual wartime scenario or who were enlisted in military service, but certainly those men, too. I am also talking about the dude who sees every scenario in life as a do-or-die situation, who can’t get over his past and is still stuck in whatever fight he last won. Whether it’s the high school football game or your career as a police officer, you’ve got to move on. There is a battle in front of you that you refuse to face. And because of this denial, you are already losing. Men tend to find something they’re good at, optimize for success, then relive those greatest accomplishments over and over for the rest of their lives until they keel over. Their greatest hope is that people say nice things about them after they become worm food. Sometimes, because they’re living too small a life, they invent thre...

Our children and young adults are becoming mindless drones, victims of a politically correct educational system and a culture that prizes comfort over virtue. In the past twenty years, ADHD diagnoses alone have more than doubled with the prevalence of accidental or “unnecessary” ingestion of the medication increasing by more than 60 percent.[*] We are medicating our children and exposing them to more medications at home more than ever before. Kids are bored, and instead of giving them an outlet for their boredom and creativity, we are drugging them.

What benefit does society get from killing a child’s love for life and adventure? They become an adult that is easier to control. In the words of Anthony Esolen, “If we can but deaden the imagination, then, we can settle the child down, and make of him that solid, dependable, and inert space-filler in school and, later, a block of the great state pyramid.”

In other words, if you can get a kid to stop dreaming, you can get him to conform to an authoritarian system without even knowing it. It makes perfect sense to me that state schools would want to raise good little cogs in the machine rather than the bold and independent thinkers you and I would like to send out into the world. Esolen continues in his book Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, “Contemporary life happens within walls; for the first time in the history of the human race, most people will spend most of their lives indoors. . . . Children no longer play because we have taken from them the opportunity and, I’ll insist, even the capacity to play.” This is a tragedy, one that needs to be stopped immediately.

By the mid-1970s, Grandma’s common sense had been all but drowned out by the shouts of people with capital letters after their names, who claimed that not only did Grandma not really know what she was talking about (she hadn’t gone to college after all), but she also had been dispensing advice that was bad for the psychological health of children. America’s parents were now in thrall to Postmodern Psychological Parenting (PPP), an anomalous hybrid of three historically antagonistic schools of psychological thought: Freudian, humanistic, and behavioral. . . . . . . When [PPP] began gaining a toehold in our culture, every single indicator of positive well-being in America’s children has been in a state of precipitous decline. . . . . . . In just one fifteen year period, from 1980 to 1995, the suicide rate for boys ages ten to fourteen almost doubled! . . . I grew up in the 1950s. Ironically, my peers and I were expected to shoulder more responsibilities than are kids today, and our parents and teachers expected a lot more of us than is the case today, yet we were much happier than are today’s kids.

After I left military life, I went back to college and entered the workplace. I noticed quickly how businesses and organizations adopted the language of “everyone working toward a common goal,” but rarely did they mean it. At least, not in the way soldiers mean it. In corporate culture, it is every man for himself while the higher-ups co-opt the language of “teamwork.” War veterans go work for these businesses only to discover after several years of slugging it out “for the team” that the company is doing well, but no one was looking out for anyone but themselves. I have felt duped in the past by “team talk” that was really only a cheap facade for “our shareholders want higher profits.” In the environment I’m thinking of, it was every man for himself, and I seemed to be the last to know it. This can be quite disillusioning for someone who really is ready to sacrifice all for the cause. As a result, many soldiers are left in the dust, casualties of a system that didn’t give back to them in any degree commensurate with what they contributed. It’s a different world, and they don’t know how to adapt. If you come from a military background, you are going to have to look out for your interests because “the company” almost always cares only about “the company.” And “the company” doesn’t include you, typically.

For instance, to carry a gun you have to get a permit from the government. Think about that. You have to get permission from the state to exercise your right that exists to protect you from the state. We must get permission from the government to be able to have the ability to resist the government. That’s crazy. In other countries, the citizens have no right to defend themselves against potential government corruption, hostile neighbors, and so on. Many laws infringe upon our most basic rights to self-protection, and we just take it. I call that tyranny.

The first steps to staying free, then, are having the means to feed and protect ourselves. Otherwise, we are weaker than we realize, one small step away from losing everything. That’s not a level of vulnerability I am comfortable with, and I hope you aren’t, either. Whatever you can do to gird yourself against potential attacks from those who claim to govern you is a wise choice.

To die well, you need to live well, which means you need something worth fighting for, a cause to believe in with such conviction that you are willing to not only stand up and defend it but lay down your very life for it. A life of significance will end in a death of significance. So, how do you live well? You become a Warrior Poet, discovering that warrior spirit buried in the recesses of your soul. You face the coward within and become a dangerous man. In humility, you realize how far you have to go and all the areas of weakness you still have to work through. You live as if you were dying, aware that death is always around the corner, never taking it for granted. You wield truth as a weapon in defense of what is right and good, speaking up in the face of evil, disciplining your mind to always be learning and growing. You pursue your muse daily with passion and gusto, dancing with her—and all of life—as you go. You commit to chipping off the sharp edges of you, so that you can love and lead better. You chase goodness above any thought of greatness, keeping eternity in your sights at all times, remembering that your legacy is being written in real time, happening in this very moment. And even though it’s difficult, you keep your priorities straight, making room in life for loved ones. You stay humble and apologize when you spend your time in stupid, foolish ways. Not least of all, you never forget that freedom is not just given; it is also taken. The world is dangerous, a...