What's Your Valley Forge?

For many people around the world, this is the Christmas season, but there is more to December than trees and tinsel.

Today, we commemorate the beginning of key turning point in the American Revolution, one that can inspire us in our own lives.

The dishwasher is on the fritz.  Your favorite Netflix series just ended, and now you have to wait a year for the next season.  Then there's that jerk who keeps spouting off on Facebook.

Life's tough these days, isn't it?

If only you could go back to a simpler place and time — say, Valley Forge during the winter of 1777-1778.

Cold, Hunger, and Illness

George Washington and his fellow soldiers, who began constructing a winter camp outside Philadelphia on this day, December 19, nearly 250 years ago, didn't have to worry about dishwashers, Netflix, or social media — or, for that matter, shrinkflation, escalator etiquette, or long lines at Starbucks.

To be clear, they did have a few annoyances of their own.  There was, for starters, the brutal cold, made especially daunting because of a lack of blankets, coats, and even shoes.  At one point in March, according to army records, nearly 3,000 men were deemed unfit for duty simply because they didn't have sufficient clothes.  Writing for History.com, Bob Drury and Tom Clavin, authors of the book Valley Forge, refer to "barefoot sentries standing on their hats in the deepening snow."

The army was also short on food.  A few years earlier, in the summer of 1775, the soldiers outside Boston had had plenty to eat, but now supply lines had been disrupted, and winter is not an ideal time for foraging.

Without modern medicine, furthermore, the soldiers were vulnerable to dysentery, typhus, smallpox, influenza, pneumonia, and typhoid fever.  By the end of the six months they spent at Valley Forge, some 2,000 of them were dead, even though no battles had taken place.

Simply enduring cold, hunger, and sickness would be enough, more than enough, to try the resilience and threaten the survival of any human being, but these soldiers also had work to do.

For starters, they had to build their own shelters — some 1500 or 2000 of them — out of whatever wood they could manage to harvest, cut, and assemble.  These crude log huts would have to house some 12,000 soldiers, along with hundreds of women and children who were living alongside them in the camp.

The work the men had to do during their time at Valley Forge would have been easier with help from beasts of burden, but . . .

"Horses and oxen were in such short supply," Drury and Clavin explain, "that the men were reduced to yoking themselves to makeshift carts."

In short, the men had to be their own beasts of burden.

Then There Was This War Going On . . .

Once they had completed their huts, the men couldn't simply hunker down in them with whatever blankets they could find.  They were soldiers, after all, and they were here for a reason.

The British army had occupied the colonial capital of Philadelphia.  General Washington's Continental Army, as David McCullough explains in his book 1776, was waiting out the winter while also protecting the nearby area.  At the same time, the soldiers also needed to protect themselves.

Washington recorded that he "ordered the Troops to be in rediness"; however, "the Men were unable to stir on Acct. of Provision."

In short, under such mind- and body-crushing conditions, even the threat of the mighty British army — the greatest fighting force in the world in 1777 — was the least of their worries.

Affliction that Anneals

"Whatever doesn't kill you only makes you stronger."

I don't entirely buy this line.  I could name a dozen scourges — alcoholism, PTSD, childhood trauma, and more — that are just plain destructive.  I hope no one would prescribe them to a friend with the hopes of making them stronger.

There are, however, many hardships that can leave us better if we treat them as challenges to be overcome and not merely as afflictions to be bemoaned.

"Valley Forge is not the site of a great battle, but it has long been recognized as the site of a great victory— a victory of the human spirit," author John B.B. Trussell writes, "It was a triumph of endurance and dedication over starvation, nakedness, cold, disease, and uncertainty."

The "victory" cannot be attributed entirely to the adversity of the conditions; a Prussian officer, Baron Von Steuben, played a crucial role in training the American soldiers during the encampment.  Still, as Trussell (himself a decorated Army veteran) observes, the soldiers at Valley Forge overcame afflictions that could have destroyed them — and that had destroyed many of their comrades.  Emerging from such hardships can be inspiring and empowering.

The name Valley Forge comes from an actual forge — that is, a place where metal was heated to a high temperature so that it could be formed into something useful.  During the six months the Continental Army spent here, Washington's ragtag fighting force was forged — though not by heat, ironically, but by cold, along with deprivation, sickness, and physical exertion — into an army that could ultimately defeat the mighty British force.  (Thanks for suggesting that analogy, Chris Young!)

An Eponym for Our Own Lives

English has thousands of words that can be traced back to proper nouns — that is, names of specific people, places, etc.  We call them eponyms, and examples include champagne (from Champagne, a region where the grapes for champagne are grown) and John Hancock (as in a signature, from delegate John Hancock's famously large signature on the Declaration of Independence).

I would like to nominate Valley Forge to serve in this capacity.  As an eponym, the phrase could refer to a profound challenge in your life, one that could have deeply damaged or even destroyed you, but didn't; instead, you endured and emerged with resilience, strength, and confidence.

I'll bet that many of you can think of such a trial — maybe multiple trials — that you have faced.  How did you fare?  I hope you emerged stronger, more confident, more resilient.  If you did, it's easy to see why.  After all, if you could do this, you could do just about anything.

Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage, has suggested that humans can pursue three mental paths after adversity.  While two of these paths lead to deterioration and stagnation, a "Third Path" leads to a better place.  In other words, when we manage our trials effectively, we can parlay problems into progress.

What's your Valley Forge?  I encourage you to take some inspiration from the story of Washington and the men, women, and children around him and find a Third Path.

After all, there will be Valley Forges, but there will also be Yorktowns.  Sometimes you have to overcome the one to make it to the other.