Finding Courage

Finding courage can be a very difficult thing.

Finding courage is quite easy when it is just for a moment or the nature of the situation is such that is something truly noble.  Then one can find one's fear consumed in the moment or overcome with the greatness of the task at hand.  In these times courage is at hand like a trusted sword, easily available to draw out and engage.

But courage can be very difficult to find in the daily grind of life, when there is no great event that calls it forth or a truly noble task.  Instead, it seems that courage can be required for the simple task of living day to day or facing down the demons of the quiet spaces within our own souls.

It happened to me last night, driving back from class.  I suddenly just found myself overwhelmed - almost to tears.  Concerning what I do not know that I could tell you - certainly nothing had happened in class to garner this kind of reaction.  But there I was, feeling suddenly bereft and alone and wandering, to the point that disconnected from my where and when I stopped at a green light, looking two lights down to the red one I saw in the distance.

It takes a sort of courage at those moments to, the sort of courage to pull one's self back away from the brink and continue to move forward into life.  It does not feel like courage, of course:  we often associate courage with great feelings of power and fearlessness, while this kind of courage feels like I am just dragging myself out of a pit to stumble forward.  But it is a sort of courage none the less - perhaps even more critical than the first sort of courage I wrote about.

For the first sort of courage there is often a sense that the outcome is not necessarily relevant - one could conceivable die or lose a job or even simply be yelled at, but it is subsumed in the overwhelming sense of rightness and doing right and greatness of heart.  However the second sort of courage is based not on the moment but on the outcome if one does not take action of courage - the depression that one will slip into, the despair that one will find on the morrow, the emptiness of one's own soul unless the courage is engaged and the sense of defeat is overcome with the thought of "One Day More".

It is the unrecognized sort of courage of course, and hardly the sort of thing any movies will be made of. But that moment of finding courage can become the most important exercise of all - because unlike the courage of the moment, the courage of endurance is habit learned like any other and if faithfully practiced even in the darkest of moments can become a life of courage:  not the necessarily the courage of greatness but the courage of pushing forward in the midst of a life which may so often feel like it is collapsing upon itself.