Has Life Left You Hardened Or Tempered?

Blast furnaces of Třinec Iron and Steel Works. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I would like to ask you all to indulge me in the following analogy.  I am by no means intimately familiar with metalworking, so if I make factual mistakes while making my analogy, I claim creative license.

When steel is worked, it goes through several processes. First, it’s placed in the furnace, and the heat of the fire softens the steel, allowing it to be shaped, or ‘worked’, after which it is plunged into water or oil.  At this point, the steel is ‘hardened’, but it isn’t strong;  carbon trapped inside the now crystallized part of the steel  causes it to be brittle.  If the steel were left in this state, a hard blow could cause it to break or shatter.  To prevent this, the steel is then submitted to a process called ‘tempering‘, by which it is again heated, but to a lower temperature, until the carbon has had time to diffuse out of the crystallized parts of the steel, and allowed to cool slowly until it reaches the desired ‘temper point’, and only then is it plunged into the water or oil, to stop the tempering process at the desired point.  If this process is done properly, you are left with a piece of steel which has most of the strength of hardened steel, but much less susceptible to breakage.

The troubles we face in our lives are much like this process.  Our hard times are the furnaces in which we are forged.  They shape and harden us, but if we leave it there, if we simply stop at the first plunge of relief when they are over, we are left brittle.  Fear, anger, bitterness… we use these things to make us hard, yet they make us brittle as well.  If we never move past this point, we are left in a state in which any hard blow may break or shatter us.

If we are to prevent this brittleness, we must return to the fire.  By this I mean either self-reflection or even therapy.  We have to return (in our minds – not literally, unless it is necessary for some reason) to our ‘trial by fire’ once the situation is over.  When we reflect on it, the fire isn’t as hot as it was while it was happening, but it’s still hot.  This allows us time to release the carbon, or ’emotions’, that were trapped inside us originally.  Fear, anger, bitterness, these emotions are all things we need to face and release, because they make us brittle.

We often mistake our ‘hardness’ for strength, when in fact, it leaves us vulnerable.  A tree that is ‘hard’ will be broken by a strong wind, but a flexible one will simply bend, then return to its previous place when the storm has passed.  Steel that is ‘hardened’ can be shattered by a strong blow, but steel that has been ‘tempered’ is made flexible again, able to withstand things that neither untouched nor hardened steel can.

No matter what you have gone through – rape, abuse, heartbreak, betrayal – if you want to have the strength that is available to you, not simply the hardness, you must go through the tempering process.  It is not enough to simply survive the fire, you must revisit it, and allow it to make you stronger with the same heat with which it made you hard.

Learning a lesson from the fire doesn’t get rid of it, no more than dunking red-hot steel in water quenches the furnace in which it is forged.  Our experiences will always be there, it’s what we take away from them that makes us stronger or weaker.

It is my sincerest wish that you all have:

strength instead of hardness,

resilience instead of brittleness,

joy instead of fear,

peace instead of anger,

happiness instead of bitterness,

and a life lived to the fullest.

~A

My sincerest thanks to MsTranquility for inspiring this blog post… may all your elephants shrink, and all your turtles grow wings. 🙂

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