Brave men rejoice in adversity, just as brave soldiers triumph in war...

"Find out what you're afraid of and go live there." - Chuck Palahniuk

Mr. Palahniuk is the author of "Fight Club" that, yes, was a book before it was a movie. The man is a somewhat dark and demented author, but poetic and invigorating and exciting. To really appreciate him you have to peel away the layers of what he writes to find some underlying, deeply buried moral that exists in his writings. If you do, then amidst the animated violence and degradation that we all intuitively associate with a movie like "Fight Club," and so also the author that we may not even know, we can discover soul-searching parcels such as the one highlighted above.

Fight Club is not about fighting, neither the book nor the movie. It's about an ideology other than the materialist one to which we all mindlessly abide. More than that, it is about a polarizing new ideology that forces us to confront the choices that we have made in our own lives and whether or not they are the appropriate ones. The message to me really seems to focus on what can happen when we accept ANY ideology without paying close attention to ensure that we are in control of our ideology and not that our ideology controls us and inevitably leads us to commit random acts of vandalism and possibly incinerate credit card buildings in an attempt to erase the national debt and wipe the slate clean.

My focus today, though, wants to stay on the quotation above. As Colonel Kurtz aptly puts it in Apocalypse Now in 1979 (which was also based on a book written before the movie came out, The Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad) horror has a face and you must make a friend of horror or else it is truly an enemy to be feared. Confrontation to the ultimate degree is our chance to prove ourselves, our bank-like stress tests in a sense. The first Century Roman philosopher Seneca wrote, "Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men." We are defined by our battle-hardened bodies and psyches much like the soldier receives adornment beside his lapel for his struggles. We have our sniper medals, and purple hearts, and medals of honor, except we don't place them neatly on our chests, nor should we. Because the knowledge is won internally so too should the knowledge remain. We find out something about ourselves by going to battle in our lives, and there is no reason to boast or brag about our accomplishments by putting them on display. We cannot assume that we know the battle tested hearts of the people walking past us.

The sentiment in the quotation, then, follows: we must find exactly what it is we are afraid of, and then set up camp until we overcome that fear. A man must be willing to face his fears or else he does not know of what he is truly afraid. I'll tell you, cancer was not something that I was excited about, but it was something that I had to confront. I have done as best I could. If you bring yourself to the challenge and do not run from your fears, and you do the best you can, then you have already won. A tragedy is an opportunity to do something special.

"I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That's the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about." - Chuck Palahniuk