Taming the Beast

The relentless battle for my humanity

Hi. I'm Anthony Howard and this is where we talk about you, your leadership and our world over a quiet coffee. If you've received this directly, then you are subscribed (thank you). If someone forwarded it to you, and you want to be part of the conversation, please click on this button. It will cost you nothing:

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a (very personal) reflection from my Journal

I woke up this morning wearing my humanity. But, and I feel as if I should be ashamed to admit this, it's not my humanity I feel. It's not my humanity that cloaks me.

It's my masculinity, my manhood, in all its messiness, in all its power.

Doing what I love …

We speak of the human condition. Well I, and my brothers-in-arms, have the ‘masculine’ condition. And it's a beast that I have fought for more than 30 million minutes. Even when I sleep, he plots and lurks, waiting to assail me when I least expect it, when I am not prepared for the assault. He wears me down with his incessant demands for power. He wants power over others and power over me.

I have spent my entire life with a battle raging in my soul, and he whom I fight is myself.

If you find me distracted or not paying attention, it may be because the monster has all my attention in that moment as I try to rein him in, to keep him on a leash. If I have spoken inappropriately with words that sound harsh or cruel, it's the beast of a man unleashed.

My life is filled with shame and regret over the many times I have failed to rein in the beast—with which the beast taunts me regularly, while lasciviously longing for more.

We talk of the better angels of our nature; and how I do seek them. But oh, how I find my efforts exhausted. Not from liberating angels, but from civilising a caveman. The angels lie in the feminine; in the grace and beauty of the woman, of a woman. And the beast, my beast, is in love with her, desperately wanting to be her prince, but fighting the turmoil of his masculinity.

He wants to be a better man. He wants to be a prince among men: not to rule and oppress, but to love and honour and serve and protect.

He wants, in short, to be a man.

It's exhausting in its relentlessness.

The beast is only ever satisfied by primal desires: money, sex and power. My lifelong work is to not feed the beast, because if I do, he can overpower me. He is never satisfied.

And so discipline and diligence, mission and meaning, value and vocation, give me focus and direction as I drag behind me this snarling, hungry beast to whom I am chained. While he weighs me down, I climb ever upwards.

This is manhood.

This is masculinity.

Not punching down those in our way, but punching down the beast within. For the greater obstacle of freedom is not the cliffs we climb, but rather the chains we carry, the chains in which we are bound.

This manhood is a wondrous, glorious life.

Every day offers the occasion for storming a citadel, for winning a battle, for flying the flag of victory.

You don't see it, this interior struggle against myself. You just see the times I fail, and quite gladly remind me. But I meanwhile celebrate, which annoys the hell out of you, because I have this day won a thousand skirmishes against an unrelenting enemy, and that enemy is me.

But I don't want you to know the enemy, because you will confuse him with me, (and I know the irony of that statement). No, I want you to meet the prince, a prince among men, a man of honour and chivalry, a knight in shining armour, who has broken the power of the beast and channels it to defeat the real enemies of civilisation.