Courage, Fear, and our vulnerability

Photo by Man Dy on Pexels.com

Without courage, we can not practice any virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous or honest.

Maya Angelou

Life is a strange, yet beautiful composition of laughter and tears, joy and sorrows, love and loss, struggle and stumble, success and failure, expectations and disappointments and a lot more.. It is completely perfect with all its ingredients and flavours, nothing is out of context.

We are living in a time of “disconnection” — more importantly, a disconnection with our authentic selves and emotions. We don’t embrace any emotion as is, and identify it as either “good” or “bad”. Therefore, we know none at its core level. We usually mask our genuine emotion just to fit-in the society we live in. For example, it can be embarrassing for us to talk about our fears, while being “fearless” is the ideal term to be cheered. Fear is as genuine emotion of being human as any other..and we all have it, but prefer to mask it. Similarly we resist to have feelings of disappointment, loss, worry, sadness and all those equally real emotions, but labelled as “bad feelings”. I believe that experiencing all these emotions, without attaching any label of good or bad, is what truly makes us “whole” as a humanbeing.

Courage, for me, is a virtue that we can’t have without embracing our vulnerability as a humanbeing. We can’t have courage unless we remove our emotional masks. Masking our emotions, itself, is a fear and can be toxic. It stands between us and our authenticity. Courage, on the other hand, is crucial for a person’s wellbeing. We can feel fear, and still moving on, is courage. We can be hurt but still stay open to love, is courage. We can meet a lot of disappointments, still never losing hope, is courage. We can suffer betrayal, still believing in trust, is courage. We can be alone to speak the truth, still saying it anyway, is courage. Courage is “going the extra mile”. Courage is “speaking your heart and living in a way that feels true to you”. For me courage is something very sacred and valuable.. because only then we can have our true authentic experience of life. And i feel, only then we can have a genuine human experience too.

You can’t fully live your life without experiencing the joy, the beauty, and the fear, the sadness.

Jeremiah Say