Living with
Courage
“I've
been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let
it stop me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.”
Georgia
O'Keefe
I have a friend whose
going off to graduate school in another city a long way from home.
He's about thirty, has had a steady job, though not one that excited
his imagination. He's spent the decade since finishing undergraduate
school pondering what might be his purpose in life. Some of us know
from childhood exactly what we intend to do in this world, but for
some of us, it takes cooking. This young man is his parents' only
chick, and, as a teaching associate, he will teach creative writing
to a prison population. You can imagine how this information is being
received and processed by the parental unit—not well, not well at
all. They are justifiably terrified. So terrified, in fact, that they
have done everything possible to impede his path.
It reminds me of the
story of my Uncle Jerry's going off to the Navy after the bombing of
Pearl Harbor. My grandmother, newly widowed and raw as a bone,
actually climbed on the bus and attempted to physically drag him off.
He, of course, resisted, served in the Pacific in both World War II
and the Korean War, and lived to tell the story with great amusement
his whole life. Fear, justified or not, is a hobgoblin that can make
us miserable, and stop us from fulfilling our life's purpose if we
let it. Operating in spite of fear, whether our own, or that of
someone we love, takes tremendous courage.
Theodore Roosevelt said,
“Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance
to work hard at work worth doing.” I know my friend is following
his heart. He may find the work daunting; may, as Georgia O'Keefe
said, be terrified every moment of his life, but he will gain
enormous experience and solidify his own trust of himself by standing
with the fear and doing what he wants to do anyway. I wish him
Godspeed.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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