Learn, Share, Grow - Courage

March 14, 2022

Below is a lesson from Daily Good on what courage is, as well as our key learnings.

The Blue Courage team is dedicated to continual learning and growth.  We have adopted a concept from Simon Sinek’s Start With Why team called “Learn, Share, Grow”.  We are constantly finding great articles, videos, and readings that have so much learning.  As we learn new and great things, this new knowledge should be shared for everyone to then grow from.

Courage

by David Whyte

COURAGE 

is a word that tempts us to think outwardly, to run bravely against opposing fire, to do something under besieging circumstance, and perhaps, above all, to be seen to do it in public, to show courage; to be celebrated in story, rewarded with medals, given the accolade, but a look at its linguistic origins is to look in a more interior direction and toward its original template, the old Norman French. 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. 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 things we find we already care deeply about: with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on. To be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made.

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Key Learnings:

• Courage -- a look at its linguistic origins is to look in a more interior direction and toward its original template, the old Norman French.
• Courage is:
  • the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future.
  • to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.
  • 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 things we find we already care deeply about: with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on.
  • to stay close to the way we are made.
• French philosopher Camus: live to the point of tears, not as a call for maudlin sentimentality, but as an invitation to the deep privilege of belonging and the way belonging affects us, shapes us and breaks our heart at a fundamental level.
• Courage is what love looks like when tested by the simple everyday necessities of being alive.
• To allow ourselves to feel deeply and thoroughly what has already come into being is to change our future, simply by living up to the consequence of  knowing what we hold in our affections.
• On the inside we come to know who and what and how we love and what we can do to deepen that love; only from the outside and only by looking back, does it look like courage.