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 âin the flow of the worldâ
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some of the boldest things iâve done are things that didnât feel like âmeâ doing them - mostly the opposite of how pop culture heroes work (with interesting exceptions, eg avatar). it felt like i was âchannelingâ something, or like i was âplaying improv with the universeâ
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conversely the times in my life i have felt most cowardly (i mean this neutrally) were times i felt most âcut off from the flow of the world.â alone, isolated, not just from people but also sunlight, water, all good things. canât hear the music playing so i canât dance
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maybe one way to say it is that courage is not a thing a person has. it canât 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 whatâs different now is that iâm talking to people, about the stuff thatâs really on my mind. and theyâre *responding*! with whatâs really on *their* mind! thatâs the âflow of the worldâ 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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Machiavelli wrote that order makes men brave and chaos makes them cowards. If we apply this idea more broadly an "orderly" relationship with world and self makes you courageous, and an irregular one makes you a coward no matter your "Willpower"
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how do you get here? what if you always feel disconnected from the flow of the world
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this is a good hard question and i do not have a short answer to it! in some sense most of my tweets are one way or another trying to address some step towards this
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Here's a similar idea as presented through the lens of competitive games which really completely changed my worldview when I read it
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ăćĄäșșăăŻæŠćšă«ăȘă
From Tokidoâs book
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This whole thread is a very Taoist view, and I love it; I think this applies to a lot more of the positive qualities/virtues than just Courage, and that this is important!
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As a specific example, I believe that the degree to which "intelligence" follows roughly the same dynamic you described in the thread on courage is very underappreciated
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