I've been meditating on the nature of risks, fears, and -most importatly- courage as of late. I recently did something that terrified me(primarily because of its potential to wreak havoc with my heart and emotions). I really wrestled with this decision...because I knew that making it could turn out quite badly...and it may yet. Quite frankly, courage doesn't always pay. Sometimes courage can cost you the greatest happiness you could ever desire. Courage means confronting an issue, facing a challenge that may result in the greatest ecstasy or the ultimate sorrow. Courage means honesty...and that honesty can be both freeing and devastating. Courage doesn't mean that you will be rewarded for your sacrifice, for conquering your fears and quelling your panic to reach for that dream which is just in sight but not in your grasp.
More often than not, it will instead leave you battered and broken. No single act can produce greater suffering, isolation, and utter devastation as an act of courage. No other effort can result in greater suffering, sorrow, and heartache. Courage requires risk and sacrifice. It forces us to surrender our facades, tear down our inner strongholds, and strip away the layers of our superficiality until only a breathtakingly vulnerable and beautiful authenticity remains. The physical, emotional, and/or spiritual cost of courage is the greatest of all debtors, because its rewards are as blissfully wonderful as its punishments are earth-shatteringly cruel.
There is nothing as rapturously beautiful as a moment of true courage. The boundless hope, the all too brief breath of belief that the future is limitless, and the fleeting second when possibilities are endless following a moment of courage is unequaled in both its divinity and savagery. The potential harm inflicted by moments of courage, the depthless despair that unrewarded acts of bravery can inspire, may - in fact - drive a person to abandon said acts altogether. Better to tread the earth in mediocrity than to taste the skies and fall.
This passive alternative, though, this quiet resignation to a world without joy, is no less painful than the wounds one may recieve in the quest for courage. The mind-numbing agony of indecision, the gnawing voice in your mind that screams "What if?" is by no means a better bedfellow. The refusal to act courageously is a decision to be tormented by the ghosts of what might have been. You will never have a moment's peace or a smidgen of traquility in the absence of courage, because courage can provide the one thing we humans crave the most: answers. For better or worse, courage enables us to confront our fears, summon our integrity, and discuss the things that most terrify us. Abandonment, rejection, heartbreak, isolation: we risk all these things when we choose daring over a silent despondency, but better an honest desolation than an artificial joy based on ignorance. To be courageous is to seek the truth, trusting that - no matter how painful - we are capable of moving beyond that pain and that it is impossible for us to embrace a lie - no matter how beautiful - and still be satisfied.
Courage is pain; truth is pain, but both courage and truth are unquestionably real. And I'd rather live an authentic life - one with both intense joy and uncomprehendable sorrow - than settle for a pale imitation.
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I'm fighting for courage right now.
I'm fighting for my right to possess it.
In the face of all the stuff that's been happening lately, I have no reason not to grasp it and hold on. It can't possibly get much worse than this, can it?
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