pop culture, i think, gives us a mostly wrong picture of where courage comes from. in pop culture courage often comes from knowing you are the chosen one and/or have superpowers. in my experience i have been the most courageous when i felt most “in the flow of the world”
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some of the boldest things i’ve done are things that didn’t feel like “me” doing them - mostly the opposite of how pop culture heroes work (with interesting exceptions, eg avatar). it felt like i was “channeling” something, or like i was “playing improv with the universe”
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conversely the times in my life i have felt most cowardly (i mean this neutrally) were times i felt most “cut off from the flow of the world.” alone, isolated, not just from people but also sunlight, water, all good things. can’t hear the music playing so i can’t dance
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maybe one way to say it is that courage is not a thing a person has. it can’t be localized to a person. courage is relational. it is a kind of fitting of a person to the world. that fit is what distinguishes it from recklessness, which does *not* fit to the world
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i have been kind of shocked how much better i feel now than in december, and most of what’s different now is that i’m talking to people, about the stuff that’s really on my mind. and they’re *responding*! with what’s really on *their* mind! that’s the “flow of the world” for me
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but what it tells me is that
if I make bold, audacious leaps of faith
there will be people who show up quietly behind the scenes to support me
to lend me their strength, their knowledge, their expertise
it's a huge honor and also like a massive societal-level optical illusion
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The Conscious Leadership Group describes this as the different kinds of consciousness between To Me, By Me, Through Me, and As Me.
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Pop culture often fails to disambiguate courage and heroism. Courage requires some risk to self.
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I've felt the boldest when I had no goddamn idea whether I'm supposed to be doing something else or what others think about a thing and just did whatever the fuck I wanted to
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yes, and that requires a certain level of trust in that "whatever the fuck i wanted to" feeling! there have def been times in my life when i didn't trust that feeling and it mostly has to do with how close i feel to the "flow of the world"
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