Discovering Our Breadth by Facing Hard Things
Created at: August 10, 2025
It is in the acts of facing what is hard that we discover how wide we can grow. — Toni Morrison
Understanding Morrison's "wide" growth
At the outset, Morrison's line insists that growth is not a vertical ladder but a widening—an enlargement of empathy, skill, and imagination. By saying "acts," she foregrounds repetition: courage is a practice, not a one-off epiphany. Facing what is hard might be grief, accountability, craft, or a new language; in doing so, we gain breadth. This redefinition resists narrow metrics of success—titles, ranks—and relocates worth in the capacity to hold more of life without breaking. With that frame in place, we can see how older traditions anticipated her insight.
Philosophical threads of confronting difficulty
Historically, philosophers argued that difficulty discloses character. Epictetus's Enchiridion (c. 125 CE) notes that trials reveal who we are; Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols (1888) compresses it to "what does not kill me..." Meanwhile, James Baldwin warned, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced" (1962). These claims converge on Morrison's "acts": confrontation is a creative force. Yet intuition benefits from evidence, so we turn to psychology's account of why facing hardship can widen us.
Psychological mechanisms behind courage
Psychologically, two lines of research illuminate Morrison's point. Carol Dweck's growth mindset work (2006) shows that viewing ability as developable increases persistence when tasks are hard. Complementing this, post-traumatic growth research by Tedeschi and Calhoun (1996) documents how grappling with adversity can enlarge appreciation, relationships, and life philosophy. Even in therapy, exposure protocols (Foa & Kozak, 1986) help patients gently face feared stimuli, shrinking anxiety's radius. Taken together, they suggest that calibrated encounters with difficulty remodel our nervous systems and narratives. This science invites a practical question: How, day to day, do we stage such encounters without collapsing?
Everyday practices that expand capacity
From theory to practice, width grows through small, repeatable challenges. Deliberate practice research (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Romer, 1993; Ericsson & Pool, 2016) shows that targeted struggle at the edge of competence builds capacity. Micro-acts—speaking up once in a meeting, running one hill repeat, attempting a difficult passage on an instrument—teach the body that strain is survivable. Crucially, reflection converts pain into progress: brief journals, mentoring conversations, or after-action reviews translate effort into learning. This personal craft prepares us to recognize Morrison's vision in her own art.
Morrison's fiction as a living laboratory
In Morrison's Beloved (1987), Sethe's decision to name and confront her "rememory" initiates a risky, widening reckoning; as stories surface, the community's capacity to witness expands. Likewise, Milkman in Song of Solomon (1977) grows only when he faces his family's history, traveling into difficult truths that enlarge his sense of self and kinship. By contrast, The Bluest Eye (1970) shows the cost of avoidance: unfaced pain narrows perception until it crushes Pecola. Through these narratives, Morrison dramatizes how acts of facing—however imperfect—create room for more life. That room is not merely private; it has civic contours.
Communities that grow by facing truths
Collectively, societies grow wide when they face hard histories. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1996) staged public testimony to widen the nation's moral imagination beyond denial. Germany's ongoing Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung—working through the past—illustrates how institutions and curricula can confront atrocity to cultivate democratic guardrails. Even local truth projects about redlining or school segregation expand communal empathy and policy options. Such examples echo Morrison's insistence that width is built through enacted courage, not slogans. This returns us to the ethical habits that sustain the work.
Making width a daily discipline
Finally, making width a daily discipline means designing for courageous contact with difficulty. Rituals of reflection, structured discomfort (stretch assignments, feedback circles), community support, and real rest form a sustainable cycle: face, feel, make meaning, recover. Over time, the horizon moves; what once felt unthinkable becomes Tuesday. In that steady expansion, Morrison's sentence proves descriptive rather than aspirational: it is in the acts of facing what is hard that we discover how wide we can grow—and how wide a community we can welcome.