Around here, “self-reliant” is about the highest compliment you can pay a man. We say it about the rancher who fixes his own fence, the business owner who made payroll in a bad year without telling anyone how close it was, and the father who never let his kids see him worried. We mean it as praise, and most of the time it deserves to be. Nobody wants to be the man who waits around for somebody else to handle what is his to handle.
But I have been thinking about what that word does to us when things are going well. Self-reliance works, and that is the trouble with it. A man handles enough problems on his own, and he starts to believe that is how problems get handled. Somewhere in there, without ever deciding to, he quits asking for help from his wife, his friends or God, because he hasn’t needed to in a while.
You can see it in small things. He stops mentioning the business at the supper table, because there is nothing anyone there can do about it. He tells his friends he’s fine, because he mostly is. He says grace out of habit and means it about half the time. None of it looks like pride from the outside, and it doesn’t feel like pride from the inside. It feels like being a grown man.
Most of us know how to pray when the bottom falls out. A diagnosis, a layoff, a phone call at two in the morning, and a man who hasn’t had much to say to the Lord in months suddenly finds his voice. There is no shame in that. It does make you wonder, though, what we were doing with our hands the rest of the year, when they were full.
Scripture saw this coming. In Deuteronomy, Moses is speaking to people who are about to have plenty for the first time in forty years, and he does not warn them about the lean times. He warns them about the good ones. When you have eaten your fill, he tells them, and built good houses and watched your herds grow, be careful that you don’t forget where it came from and start telling yourself that your own hand did all this. Hunger keeps a man honest about what he needs. A full table can make him forget.
“Hunger keeps a man honest about what he needs. A full table can make him forget.”
That is what makes this month useful. Thanksgiving is the one day a year when most of us stop at a full table and say out loud that we did not do this by ourselves. Gratitude, when you get down to it, is an admission. To thank someone is to admit you received something you did not produce, and that is harder for a self-reliant man than it sounds. It may be why we keep it to one Thursday in November.
It isn’t only the good things we hold too tightly, either. Some men are carrying anger at somebody who wronged them. Some are carrying shame over something they did. Some are carrying a business, a family or a reputation on their own backs because they can’t imagine who else would. The weight is different from one man to the next, but the grip is the same, and so is the reasoning: this is mine, and I’ll deal with it.
I know something about that. There are a couple of things in my own life that I held onto well past the point of them doing me any good. I’m not going to lay them out here, because they aren’t the point and you have your own. What I can tell you is that holding on longer did not make either one lighter.
You’ll meet a man in this month’s cover story who found the bottom of his own strength. I’ll let him tell you where it was, because he tells it better than I can. What I will say is that most of us seem to learn it late.
None of this is an argument against hard work or carrying your share. A man ought to carry his share. It is an argument for remembering, while the table is still full, who set it. So this month, before the plates get passed, I am going to try to do out loud what I usually wait too long to do. I am going to say thank you for what I have been given, and then I am going to name the things I have been gripping and set them down while it is still my choice. I’d invite you to do the same. It is easier with full hands than with empty ones, though I doubt many of us believe that until we have tried it both ways.
From the November 2026 issue of The Kendall Gentleman.
The cover story this column points to is Glynn Praesel: Don’t Ever Quit Climbing Trees. For more from the Publisher’s Note archive, read Faithful in the Small Things, Knowing What Is Important and The Signature We Leave.