courage...........................

 

Your first attempt might not be very good, but nobody's early work is good. There will always be a gap between where you are and where you want to be. And the bridge between that gap is courage. The courage to look foolish in the beginning. The courage to show up again when your early work is criticized. The courage to look yourself in the mirror and say, "I realize I'm not good enough yet, but the only way to get better is to keep working on it."

-James Clear, from this episode

an increased valuing...............

 

People who depend too much upon the past have become almost useless in many professions.  We need a new kind of human being who can divorce himself from his past, who feels strong and courageous and trusting enough to trust himself in the present situation, to handle the problem well in an improvising way, without previous preparation, if need be.

     All of this adds up to an increased emphasis on psychological health and strength.  It means an increased valuing of the ability to pay fullest attention to the here-now situation, to be able to listen well, to be able to see well in the concrete, immediate moment before us.  It means that we need people who are different from the average kind of person who confronts the present as if it were a repetition of the past, and who uses the present simply as a period in which he prepares for future threats and dangers, which he doesn't trust himself enough to meet unprepared when the time comes.

-Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature

wrestling with catastrophe.............

 

And so we’re in a very dim and grim time, but we have to have a blues sensibility. And the blues is about wrestling with catastrophe, but never allowing catastrophe to have the last word, because we have a love and a courage and a joy inside of us that can never be taken away.

-Cornell West, as lifted from here

the courage to change...........

 

Just because you've begun down one path doesn't mean you're committed to it forever, especially if that path turns out to be flawed or impeded.  At that same time, this is not an excuse to be flighty or incessantly noncommittal.  It takes courage to decide to do things differently and to make a change, as well as discipline and awareness to know that the notion of "Oh, but this looks even better" is a temptation that cannot be endlessly indulged either.

-Ryan Holiday

human dignity.........................

 

It's like the greatest painting in the modern world, which is Rembrandt's The Return of the Prodigal Son.  The story's in place.  All the conflict and tension are there, but the narrative was in place.  Rembrandt can take that for granted.  Mennonites, Jews, and others there in the Netherlands all connect to this particular way of understanding human dignity at its deepest level.  You go beyond Christianity, beyond Judaism, just human and raw, and le lays it out right before he dies, lays it down.  Now jump to our period where, existentially, we got so much conformity, complacency, and cowardliness being rewarded that courage, they squeeze out.  Now courage is the enabling virtue of all other virtues—all of them.  So, even we Christians, okay, we got faith, we got hope, and the greatest of these, love.  But where's courage?

None of them work without courage.  You can't love without courage.  God can't use cowards.  You can't sustain your faith without courage.

-Cornel West, as excerpted from Truth Matters: A Dialogue on Fruitful Disagreement in an Age of Division by Robert P. George and Cornel West

He is writing about baseball...........

 

........but it is a more apt description of football:

Sport, they said, is morally serious because mankind’s noblest aim is the loving contemplation of worthy things, such as beauty and courage. By witnessing physical grace, the soul comes to understand and love beauty. Seeing people compete courageously and fairly helps emancipate the individual by educating his passions.

-George F. Will, Men At Work: The Craft of Baseball

faith.................................

 

Faith is not certainty.  It is the courage to live with uncertainty.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

the leap of faith.................

 

-Tanmay Vora, Three Buckets of Courage

furious indifference...........................

 Courage is almost a contradiction in terms.  It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.  "He that will lose his life, the same shall save it," is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes.  It is a piece of everyday advice . . . A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying.  He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape.  He must not merely wait for death, for then we will be a suicide, and will not escape.  He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it, he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.

-Gilbert Keith Chesterton

mind-body learning..............

       Tightly constrained by risk-averse, health-and-safety-obsessed society, many children are unable to light fires, paddle canoes, make shelters, use knives or cope with darkness.  Further, children are discouraged from acts of physical courage and this is more serious than it appears, for we learn with our bodies as well as our minds—or rather we learn with the mind-body—and when we see our physical selves modelling bravery, our sense of moral courage, political courage, emotional courage or intellectual courage is heightened.

-Jay Griffiths, A Country Called Childhood

Courage.........................

  thanks Rob

Danger.........................

I know that one of the great dangers of my life would be to live without danger.  In our encounters with the edges, we come to know ourselves more deeply.  Neurosis is a substitute for real suffering.  Fearfulness is the most common state in a life that asks for no real courage.

-Boyd Varty,  The Lion Tracker's Guide To Life 

playground lessons..............................

 It was the classic new-boy situation.  I was teased and taunted, and the hazing went on during most of the day.  I finally turned to the biggest of my tormentors and said, "All right, meet me outside."  Everybody knew there was going to be a fight.  When school was dismissed, a gang of kids was milling around by the steps of the back yard, waiting.  My opponent was waiting too.  I was frightened, but there was nothing to do about it.  I took off my coat and started running down the stairs at my enemy.  My seeming eagerness must have startled him, for I noticed that he wilted just a bit.  The fact is, I was expecting to get knocked down and was rushing in to get it over with, but when I saw him flinch, I gained new courage.  He gave up after one or two punches.  This minor incident was soon forgotten by almost everyone but me; it taught me a lesson that later applied in business every bit as  much as it did on a high-school playground:  If you show hesitancy or fear, you may already be half-defeated.  If you put on a bold front, and fight with everything you have, you can win.  Moreover, once you have won a few battles, you are usually left alone:  in the jungle, no animal thoughtlessly attacks the lion.

-William Zeckendorf, Zeckendorf; The autobiography of the man who played a real-life game of Monopoly and won the largest real estate empire in history

It's a possibility......................

 A curious paradox characteristic of every kind of courage here confronts us.  It is the seeming contradiction that we must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong.  This dialectic relationship between conviction and doubt is characteristic of the highest types of courage . . .

     People who claim to be absolutely convinced that their stand is the only right one are dangerous.  Such conviction is the essence not only of dogmatism, but of its more destructive cousin, fanaticism.  It blocks off the user from learning new truth, and it is a dead giveaway of unconscious doubt.  The person then has to double his or her protests to quiet not only the opposition but his or her own unconscious doubts as well. . . .

. . . The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one.  Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt.  To believe fully and and the same time to have doubts is not at all a contradiction: it presupposes a greater respect for truth, an awareness that truth always goes beyond anything that can be said or done at any given moment.  To every thesis there is an antithesis, and to this there is a synthesis.  Truth is thus a never-dying process.  We then know the meaning of the statement attributed to Leibnitz: "I would walk twenty miles to listen to my worst enemy if I could learn something."

-Rollo May,  The Courage To Create

Influence......................

     A choice confronts us.  Shall we, as we feel our foundations shaking, withdraw in anxiety and panic?  Frightened by the loss of our familiar mooring places, shall we become paralyzed and cover our inaction with apathy?  If we do those things, we will have surrendered our chance to participate in the forming of the future.  We will have forfeited the distinctive characteristic of human beings—namely, to influence our evolution through our own awareness. 

-Rollo May,  The Courage To Create

I went out too far.........................

     One came, finally, against the head itself and he knew that it was over.  He swung the tiller across the shark's head where the jaws were caught in the heaviness of the fish's head which would not tear.  He swung it once and twice and again.  He heard the tiller break and he lunged at the shark with the splintered butt.  He felt it go in and knowing it was sharp he drove it in again.  The shark let go and rolled away.  That was the last shark of the pack that came.  There was nothing more for them to eat.
     The old man could hardly breathe now and he felt a strange taste in his mouth.  It was coppery and sweet and he was afraid of it for a moment.  But there was not much of it.
     He spat into the ocean and said, "Eat that, galanos.  And make a dream you've killed a man."
     He knew he was beaten now finally and without remedy and he went back to the stern and found the jagged end of the tiller would fit in the slot of the rudder well enough for him to steer.  He settled the sack around his shoulders and put the skiff on her course.   He sailed lightly now and he had no thoughts nor any feelings of any kind.  He was past everything now and he sailed the skiff to make his home port as well and as intelligently as he could.  In the night the sharks hit the carcass as someone might pick up crumbs from the table.  The old man paid no attention to them and did not pay any attention to anything except steering.  He only noticed how lightly and how well the skiff sailed now there was no great weight beside her.
      She's good, he thought.  She is sound and not harmed in any way except for the tiller.  That is easily replaced.
      He could feel he was inside the current now and he could see the lights of the beach colonies along the shore.  He knew where he was now and it was nothing to get home.
      The wind is our friend, anyway, he thought.  Then he added, sometimes.  And the great sea with our friends and enemies.  And bed, he thought.  Bed is my friend.  Just bed, he thought.  Bed will be a great thing.  It is easy to know when you are beaten, he thought.  I never knew how easy it was.  And what beat you, he thought.
     "Nothing," he said aloud.  "I went out too far."

-Ernest Hemingway,  The Old Man and the Sea

photo via

Jamie Varon says....................

courtesy of Swiss Miss

Failsafe..............................

     via

A shield of courage....................

"Of all the amazing deeds of bravery of the war, I regard MacArthur's personal landing at Atsugi as the greatest of the lot," Winston Churchill wrote afterward.  The former prime minister, a connoisseur of courage, was speaking of the American general's daring flight to the heart of enemy territory at the close of the Pacific war in 1945.  The Japanese emperor, following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had called on his subjects to cease fighting, yet more than twenty divisions of soldiers, who had been prepared to give their last drop of blood to keep the Americans from securing a foothold on Japan's sacred soil, retained their weapons and their positions on the Kanto Plain.  Kamikaze pilots, some having already received the rites for the dead, awaited only a word to carry out their suicide missions.  Squads of young civilians, outraged at the emperor's call for surrender, stormed about Tokyo and nearby Yokohama vowing to resist to the end.
     Douglas MacArthur, as the commander of the U. S. Army forces in the Pacific, would receive the formal Japanese surrender on board the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay.  Prudence suggested he arrive with the ship, its powerful escort and the protection the vessels and their guns provided.  MacArthur refused.  He insisted he would enter Japan ahead of the navy, protected only by the moral force that came with righteous victory.  His aides urged him to reconsider.  Who knew what some bitter-ender might do?  All it took was one bullet, one grenade, and the general would be a dead man.  Worse, an assassination might rekindle the Japanese war spirit.  If he must enter ahead of the navy, he should wait for more army troops.  At the very least, he should be accompanied to Atsugi, the air base for Tokyo, by a substantial guard of well-armed soldiers.
      He waved aside the worries.  He declared that he would travel to Atsugi alone, with only his airplane's crew and his personal staff.  His courage would be all the shield he required.  He knew the Asian mind.  "Years of overseas duty had schooled me well in the ways of the Orient," he later wrote.  The Japanese would understand his action and be more impressed by one man alone than by any number of ships or regiments.

-H. W. Brand,  The General vs. The President:  MacArthur and Truman At The Brink Of Nuclear War

Some of each..........

"That’s why you need patience and some courage.  Those will steady you through the hard times.  Hard times will come, and I can’t tell you when. ... Remember, moderate risk wins in the end."

-David Merkel