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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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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yeah i like this too. there's a thing i wish i knew how to concisely point to where you can like start out "worse than average" at something (e.g. feelings) and then in the process of climbing up to "average" there's no reason to stop there so you shoot up to "way better"
In physical terms, I think you can describe the average players as having more inertia
A fast learner is like an arrow, and a slow learner is like a Boulder. One takes more time and energy to get from point A, to point B. But by the time it gets there, one has more momentum
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YEAH I really love that, I love seeing it in others, it's always extremely satisfying and yea I definitely think you've done that
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