I have spent a lot of time in my life building things that would not last, that were not meant to last, or rather, that were meant to last for only a specific period of time. Much of this building occurred in the decade that I ran outdoor education programs on a hundred acre plot of woods in the catskill mountains.
Some of this time-bound building was literal, as in the physical building of temporary structures. Each April as the cold weather began to break and the snow melted, I would return to the mountains with my team and we would build or rebuild the campsites and obstacle courses that our campers and school groups would use for the coming season. Our obstacles were low-tech, built by lashing logs together with twine. Many of these structures were not built to last through the winter but needed to be strong enough to hold the three hundred plus teenagers who would pass through our courses throughout the spring and summer.
There was one obstacle that needed particular attention. It consisted of one giant log attached at each end to a tree about fifteen feet up in the air and a second log that hung from the first - attached by a thick rope on each end. The second log formed a sort of swinging bridge and hung over a small creek that ran between the two trees. The objective for the group was to cross the creek by going over the swinging log. Because this log would be supporting our campers, it was imperative that the structure be sturdy. For the first two years of running this program this obstacle would not last the winter and each spring we would build it anew.
Then, in the third year, one of our team members who had a background in structural engineering became determined to build this obstacle in a manner that would be able to last not just one but several winters. We used only the same materials - logs and twine - but this time, we were extra meticulous with our lashing. We made sure that each row of twine was exactly aligned, was neat and clean with no bunching up. We added extra rows to reinforce our work. We took our time and we made each tie neat and pretty. We knew that it would not last forever. We knew that because we used twine to hold it together it would have a shorter life expectancy than if we used nails or bolts. But we also knew that it had the structural integrity it would need to last as long as we needed it to, and likely quite a bit longer.
But obstacle construction was only one kind of temporary building I did during those years. Every three days my team and I would welcome a new school group full of about thirty campers into our program and begin the process of building relationships and connections. The relationships between our staff and the campers was a key part of the program. If the campers didn’t believe that the staff would keep their word, follow through on their promises, and be capable of supporting them in this new environment, they would never put their guards down enough to learn and grow. Our staff excelled at this: sharing stories to form connections, coming up with inside jokes for the group to bond over, being trustworthy and approachable role models that were excited about getting into the deep personal conversations that the campers were quietly yearning for.
Some of these relationships and connections might only last for the three days that the campers were on the program, some campers would stay in touch with our staff over social media, and a few campers would return to our longer programs and join our ongoing community. But none of that could be known while those relationships were being built and the staff found ways to show up to each camper with curiosity, openness, and honesty. They had to hold the values of our community in every interaction. They had to be people of integrity.
It strikes me that we use the same word to describe these two different things: the integrity of a structure and the integrity of a person. When we talk about the integrity of a structure we are referring not only to its strength, but to the confidence we have that it will retain its form under pressure. When we talk about the integrity of a person perhaps we are referring to the same thing. Perhaps we are saying that a person’s strength can be found in their ability to be true to their word and the values they hold, in their ability to maintain their form, to be who they say they will be. And perhaps when we are talking about integrity as a characteristic we are talking about the level of confidence we have in a person’s ability to continue to hold form, to continue to act out their values, to continue to be who they say they will be, not only when things are going well but also when they are under pressure.
Integrity asks us to turn our body into a container for the values we hold, it requires that we consistently live out and live up to those values and ways of being that are core to the person we want to be. Integrity is the bridge between how we see ourselves and who we end up being in the world. It invites us to show up to any task be it big or small, central to our life or peripheral, short term or ongoing, as our full selves, with our values intact, true to our word, and able to hold our form in the face of whatever might meet us.
Two years after we stopped running these outdoor education programs I went with my brother to visit the property and walk our old obstacle course. When we got to the hanging log we found that the logs had started rotting in the middle, likely from many winters of snow and water accumulation. But the lashing we had done eight years earlier to attach the log across the top was as strong as it had ever been. We stood there for a while, marveled at the strength of our work, and took a few pictures. In the end, we decided that it was time to take the obstacle down. We were no longer running these programs and with the wood rotting we didn’t want to risk anyone getting hurt. The structure had maintained its integrity for eight long years, we wanted to make sure that we did as well.