The scene: I was leading a multi-day river rafting trip with 20 young offenders from a juvenile detention centre in Oregon along with seasoned river guides and four prison officers.
By about day eight of the trip, things had changed. It was subtle, not dramatic, but nobody had become a saint. Fred (the little toughie) was still capable of stirring up trouble if he got bored, and some of the boys could still produce a put-down faster than a paddle stroke. But the river had been working on them.
That night we sat around the campfire watching sparks drift into the darkness. The canyon walls had disappeared into shadow and the river hummed away somewhere beyond the circle of light.
I pulled a folded piece of paper from my pocket.
"Oh no," groaned Fred. "Another quirker." (my zany rap-like rhymes)
A few boys laughed. "You'll survive," I said.
"No guarantees," said Fred.
Crying Is Courageous.
He held it in, like boys are taught,
To hide the tears that feeling brought.
So every tear he locked away,
Behind a grin, behind ‘I’m okay.’
But one still night, he let one fall,
And found it didn’t hurt at all.
It cleared the fog, it let light in,
A healing stream upon his skin.
It didn’t mean he wasn’t tough,
He’d just grown tired of fake-man stuff.
Now tears might come most any week,
And each one makes him feel unique.
When I finished, the boys stared into the fire. Beyond the circle of light the river slid quietly through the canyon. We sat there for a while, letting the quirker settle. Then one of the boys spoke. "My old man reckons crying is for girls."
Nobody reacted but a few heads nodded as another boy tossed a stick into the fire. "My brother used to belt me if I cried." Again, nobody laughed. That interested me. A week earlier the same comment would probably have attracted enough ridicule to power a small city.
Tom was sitting opposite me. Most of the trip he'd listened more than he'd spoken. "I cried when my grandmother died," he said quietly. "I tried not to, but it just happened." "Nothing wrong with that," said one of the guides. Tom shrugged. "I know that now."
Fred poked at the fire with a stick. "You know what's weird?" he said. We waited for a brash Fred comment, but instead he quietly admitted, "I've cried heaps." That got everyone's attention. "Seriously?" "Yeah," he laughed. "Just not where anybody could see me." The boys grinned when I said, "I reckon half the blokes in Australia are probably doing exactly the same thing." A few boys laughed and many nodded.
The conversation wandered off in different directions after that, as campfire conversations do. Nobody solved masculinity, wrote a policy document or became enlightened; but something important had happened.
For ten minutes or so, a group of boys who'd spent much of their lives pretending not to care talked honestly about something most men spend their lives hiding. The river rolled on through the darkness, the fire burned lower, and I found myself wondering how different the world might be if more boys grew up hearing:
"Crying isn't weakness. Sometimes it's courage leaking out through your eyes."
Website - www.mangoodproject.com