In the spirit of full disclosure, let me start by telling you that when Anelisa asked if I could write on courage, I was hesitant. It wasn’t because it’s a boring topic, or one I find irrelevant, or anything of that sort; on the contrary, I value the idea of courage very highly and I think it’s the key to so many if not all of the other virtues. My hesitation was due to two reasons. First, I’ve read and heard a good deal on the subject, from much greater and more experienced teachers than myself. The second reason for my reluctance was that, by my own measuring stick, I haven’t done courage very well in recent weeks.
But I wrote anyway.
Someone said in a movie the other day that at times we teach best what we most need to learn. I think I agree with that mostly. My inner man knows that a lot of the things I can theoretically spew out, a lot of the advice I give, and the insights I offer are concepts I’m often grappling with at the same time. By ‘grapple’ I don’t mean a passing mental struggle; I mean ugly, brutal, untidy battles with my attitudes, core beliefs, and behaviours battles, quite frankly, which at this point I lose more often than I win.
I wrote anyway because I knew that this is the essence of courage- to take on the task in the face of justifiable fear and misgiving; to pick up the pen even as the hand bleeds from the last battle; to take on the new identity even as the echoes of the old stubbornly persist.
My aim here is not to go for courage is this and courage is not that sort of post because, again, many have done it far better than I can. What I am going for is a simple message: we all qualify to be courageous.
The reason this message is in my heart is that I came across a tweet that made me think about the subtle ways in which we disqualify each other on social media. And often we do this with benign intentions, good intentions, and intentions to offer a bit of insight. But my worry is that the most devastating lies are tinged with a bit of truth. That’s how we’re lured in. If you want to entice a priest to do drugs, you don’t invite him to a street bash. You invite him to the church across from the bash and then appeal to his compassion by pointing out that the restless souls at the bash need a saviour and remind him that Paul became all things to all men in order to reach them for Christ, and then you point out that in order to reach the drug addicts he has to be seen to do what they do too… and so on.
That’s an extreme example, but my point is that even that which sounds very true does not have good outcomes if you leave the nuance out.
The tweet, which understandably had been retweeted a few thousand times, said that “being afraid to fail will ruin you.” Taken at face value and in passing, I think it’s harmless, and contains some truth: unchecked fear disables us from doing anything. But it carries a quiet subtext: Therefore, if you want to succeed, don’t be afraid to fail.
Now, even this subtext may be passed over as harmless, again because there’s a grain of truth there.
The thing is, though, that real life paints a different picture. Many of the most successful people we know- you can use whatever measure of success- were very much afraid of failure before being successful. The key, of course, is that they acted anyway. Eric Thomas is probably the world’s foremost motivational speaker but he still gets jittery before speaking to people. Adele commands the stage as if she’s stroking the piano in her living room, and yet she suffers from stage fright so bad she sometimes worries it’ll hinder her creativity on the stage.
My own experience has shown me that my victories haven’t come because I wasn’t afraid. I was in fact very afraid to be rejected by one more university, or not make the cut for that coveted internship, or to be unable to grasp that new instrument, or fluff my lines and make no sense in front of other, more capable students at that first public speaking event. All those times, I was afraid of failure and in some instances, had good reason to be! There was evidence to support the fear.
But here is courage, friend: you send that application anyway. You open your mouth for that first song anyway. In the presence of the fear- even the understandable fear, you get in there anyway.
And if even the fear of failure doesn’t ruin us if we decide to get in there anyway, then we can all be courageous.
Even and especially when you’re afraid to fail, to fall short, whatever the case may be.
Postscript
By invalidating peoples’ fears, we essentially say that their experience of the world is either irrelevant or unacceptable or both. And when people feel like their stories and/or experiences don’t matter, they stop telling them and, worse still, stop living them. They stop writing the next chapter, putting the pen down, or giving it to somebody else who won’t write the tale quite so originally, and consequently, quite so well.
Courage doesn’t start when fear goes away. It starts when noticing the fear next to us, we stubbornly (or hesitantly or confidently or loudly or quietly) go ahead.
We’re asked a sobering question in the book of Romans: “Now hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what he sees?” Translation: if you can reasonably expect what you hope for based on some evidence, that’s not really hope. Hope by definition stakes everything on the improbable and even the impossible. We can extend Paul’s logic to courage: if we are ‘courageous’ about things we’ve already been confident about anyway, that isn’t really courage. Courage, by definition, senses the shadow of fear, acknowledges it, and walks towards the light, quaking knee and all.
Fear denied is fear multiplied.
Let’s do it. We’re all qualified.
Zama Moyo lives in Johannesburg. He completed his honours in international relations at Wits University. While busy with his honours, Zama was selected as an intern at the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA). He completed his MA in ideology and discourse analysis at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom. Zama has always loved words and penned a number of reflective essays on his personal blog Thought Box. He has also written on a broad range of issues related to current affairs. In 2013 he was selected as a finalist in the Global Human Rights Essay Contest which focused on ‘Human Rights Cities’. He is currently working on his doctoral thesis – On the intersection of ethics and public policy – at the University of Pretoria.
