Courage
is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life
Courage is what love looks like when tested by the simple everyday necessities of being alive.
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 coeur, or heart.
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.
The French philosopher Camus used to tell himself quietly to 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. It is a fundamental dynamic of human incarnation to be moved by what we feel, as if surprised by the actuality and privilege of love and affection and its possible loss. Courage is what love looks like when tested by the simple everyday necessities of being alive.
From the inside, it can feel like confusion; only slowly do we learn what we really care about, and allow our outer life to be realigned in that gravitational pull. With maturity, that robust vulnerability comes to feel like the only necessary way forward, the only real invitation, and the surest, safest ground from which to step. 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.
-from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
Written in the early morning hours in Paris, after seeing amongst the strolling lovers and the map-holding tourists along the river Seine, a young, heavily pregnant woman walking alone, distressed and crying as she looked forward — into some distance she and the river, and the new life inside her, all flowed toward. Her image stayed with me even through a marvelous dinner and good company and woke me at five in the morning with a necessity to walk with her in my imagination just a little stretch into the future.
I found my way down to the quiet and very beautiful belle epoque lobby of the hotel and wrote the piece, as the hotel and the life of the hotel and the life of Paris slowly stirred around me: thousands upon thousands of people emerging into the world, into life, into the street, trying, against all odds, to remember what they loved, and trying to remember as they moved into the waking world, how to live up to the consequences of that love.
- DW
Find the paperback version of Consolations here. We will be announcing the availability of the re-designed hardback version of Consolations in the coming months.
I would totally read a special edition of Consolations with a introduction like this to every piece. It adds a whole new layer of meaning.
Thank you, David, for reminding us that life’s greatest reward comes from honoring our true self and our capacity to be vulnerable, not from titles and awards that are fleeting and unsustainable.