Being
Courageous
“Courage
is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with
another, with a community, a work, a future. To be courageous is not
necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious
those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the
unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.”
David
Whyte (Consolations)
My
friend, Garvice, shared an excerpt from David Whyte's book,
Consolations, about courage and solace. Wonderful thoughts
about subjects we thought we knew, and a deeper look at what they
truly mean.
Our
concepts of what it means to be courageous grow up as we do. Once
upon a time, I believed courage came in the form of a handsome prince
on a white horse—like Cinderella. Later, it meant strapping on a
gun and marching off to war. And later still, I bestowed that title
on people who risked their lives every day to care for someone
else—firemen and policemen, nurses and doctors. I thought it took a
great disaster to bring out the hero in ordinary folks. All these
people are courageous, no doubt about it, but they are not alone.
These
days, I've come to see courage in the oddest places. In my friend,
Ethel, now in her 90's, who, even though she frequently doesn't feel
well, gets up everyday and goes about her life. Last Saturday she put
dozens of lilies in the church for Easter. And in my friends who've
had cancer and endured the tortures of treatment without complaint
simply because they have more to do in their lives. Courage is not as
uncommon a thing as perhaps we believe it to be: knowing who you
are, and not giving in to the pressure to be who you are not; having
convictions that you will not abandon, while being open-minded enough
to change those convictions when you are convinced you should; being
able to say, “I was wrong about that. I am sorry.” All that takes
guts.
Whyte
says, “To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the
body and in the world; to live up to and into the necessities of
relationships that often already exist with the things we already
care deeply about...To be courageous is to stay close to the way we
were made.” Courage is required to listen to opposing voices
without closing our hearts and minds, and to honestly examine whether
we are part of the problem, or part of the solution. In short, living
according to one's own conscience is an act of courage.
I'll
bet you, yourself, are a courageous person. Would your life be
different if you believed that, too?
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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