Conversation

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 ā€œin the flow of the worldā€
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some of the boldest things i’ve done are things that didn’t feel like ā€œmeā€ doing them - mostly the opposite of how pop culture heroes work (with interesting exceptions, eg avatar). it felt like i was ā€œchannelingā€ something, or like i was ā€œplaying improv with the universeā€
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conversely the times in my life i have felt most cowardly (i mean this neutrally) were times i felt most ā€œcut off from the flow of the world.ā€ 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 ā€œflow of the worldā€ for me
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