In Praise of Courage
One of the key qualities of elders is their ability to ask deep, discerning questions. One of the elders in my life pitched such a question to me yesterday evening. I was explaining my consternation and feeling of powerlessness at how fast the global order has shifted right in front of my eyes. My reflection was that this didn’t happen overnight. It has been percolating for a long while under our noses. It’s not like studying pre-French revolution history, or pre first and second world war history, it’s not even like all the time I have spent in Rwanda and seeking to understand their history, or the Selma march. I wasn’t there. I didn’t have to make the tough personal, life changing decisions that those people all had to make as their world unfolded in chaos in front of them. And if this current chaos has been percolating for some time then somehow, I have slept through it. I thought I was a pretty awake person on these issues, but I was wrong. It happened on my watch this time. In my own adult life-hood.
How I, we, slept through this is an important discussion for another blog on another day, but right now I was discussing with my elder how I am taxed by the questions of what will this require of me, what will be the little red lines that are rapidly approaching (in the USA they have already arrived in force and in multitudes), where ordinary people have to make choices, instinctively creative choices, about where they will publicly stand in relation to those red lines. What Jane Fonda is calling, ‘your Documentary moment’. The way I phrased it to my wise friend yesterday was, “I don’t know if I will have the courage to make the tough choice, to risk reputation, personal freedom, even life itself, by speaking truth to power in my actions or words; to bear the consequence of what may lay ahead sooner than we imagine”. My elder friend clearly picked up something in the way I asked my question. He reflected to me that I sounded like I was speaking from a place of self-judgement and that wasn’t going to help me much. What he then did was to suggest a different question that I might consider.
“What is the nature of your relationship to courage?”
A great question. Only an elder could come up with that rich, exploratory question.
It’s clearly time to be thinking about our relationship to courage, so that we are more familiar with its territory in our lives when the time comes to live out the answer.
“Mixed”, is my first response to the question. A mixed relationship. I see within myself a mix of courage and cowardice (maybe that’s a judgmental word as well). I see courage as the heart to stand up for what is true and right, as a human being (not just true and right for my own comfort and safety). And I see cowardice as fearfully shrinking back from saying or doing something I believe is right and true, but prioritising keeping myself from perceived harm or persecution.
I can see areas of my life where I exhibit courage, like in my own pursuit of personal development and dealing with past wounds, or in being present and honest in certain work or personal conversations. I also know I have avoided difficult conversations many times, whether with my dad to avoid his anger, or others to avoid being misunderstood or shamed. Sometimes I see courage in me verging on stupidity and at other times I just want an easy path that avoids rejection or abandonment. Looking at the past is why I think the jury is out as I look to the future.
I was 19 when I first read Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s own account of resisting the rise of Nazism, knowing the final outcome cost him his life. I haven’t forgotten him in all these decades since. I listened to Governor Pritzker of Ohio this week, in his State of the State address, saying publicly that he would ‘not bow the knee’. I watched, with my mouth open, Mariamm Edgar Budde challenging Trump at his inauguration service about injustice. These people have courage.
Interestingly I learned two things from Simon Sinek recently about courage. Firstly, it is something we have to grow, not just assume. And secondly, we grow it in relationship to others. When someone really sees us, the truth of us, then it implants courage deep within. Also, when we see others around us act courageously its puts courage into us. Encourage. ‘En’ means ‘to put into’. Our courage is awoken built and affirmed in the presence of others courage, just as our courage awakens courage in those around us. Courage is an act of leadership.
I’m thinking that courage is something we need to prepare for, to create some courage muscle, develop courage pathways, before we actually need it. Think of all of those conversations we’ve all had where 2 minutes afterwards we say to ourselves, ‘why didn’t I say that! That would have been the perfect response’. But the moment passed before we could redeem it. The need for courage will be like that. Something will happen where we simply need an instinctive response and we won’t have time for a debate with ourselves about risks and rewards. Pathways will be laid by a thousand micro decisions made in unprepared moments.
As I watch the USA right now I can already see a multitude of little but very consequential decisions, that ordinary people are having to make that may potentially cost them their friendships, their jobs, their integrity (in some situations workers are being given an email so that they can shop their work colleagues to some unknown ‘police’).
So, I will keep on thinking through my elder’s question – “Trevor, what is the nature of your relationship to courage?”
Churchill wrote (1931) that people of every level of society will be judged in the testing moments of their lives. ‘Courage’, he said, ‘is rightly the first of human qualities, because it’s the quality that guarantees all the others’.
Trevor Waldock Feb 2025