one little word

Aaah this type of writing fills me up like no other, and I’ve missed it. I feel like it’s disappeared for the larger part of the past month or so, but it is coming back, I tell you, coming back with a vengeance.

So, “one little word,” huh? I’ve been thinking about this post for the past few days, searching for that “one little word” that is whispering inspiration to me at the moment. And the one little word that kept showing up in the corners of my brain that I was scouring surprised me.

Courage.

Courage? Why not strength, or patience, or perseverance, or work, or some other word that I relate to a little more. Or at least that’s what I thought. The more I think, the more courage seems to fit, so I’m just going to roll with it.

Courage is strength. Courage is patience. Courage is perseverance. Courage is work.

Courage is sometimes standing alone, but it’s also sometimes standing in a crowd.

Courage is one of those things that often gets overlooked in the moment, but is praised in hindsight. I’m so much quicker to tall myself to be strong, or to be patient, or to persevere, or to endure, but I, for some reason, rarely tell myself to have courage. Maybe because courage seems to encompass all of those other little pieces.

So then how does a person have courage? I have a thought that courage comes from baby steps – baby steps in the right direction. It comes from living. Curling up on your own with the thought of independence in your head is a good way to trick yourself, but I’ve figured out that there is a difference between independence and living. Sometimes they go together – actually, in the best form of courage they do go together. But then there are times when you tell yourself that you’re being independent, and you say that the experience of independence is living, but you’re actually isolating – which is quite far from living, in my thoughts. For me, at least, sometimes it takes courage to find that living state of independence, that state where I’m not just labeling myself independent so I have permission from myself to hide away and live in my own neat and tidy world all the time – instead, that state where I can be independent and my own person, but also take part in the richness that is society and human diversity.

That takes courage. Courage {and strength, patience, perseverance, and work, too} to plunge deep into the world, outside of all limits of comfort. That’s what I’m in the process of working on. I’m in the moment of courage, or at least trying to be. I’m not even wading through any particularly deep sludge in life at the moment, but I think that a person can have courage for little points of stickiness along with the thick swamps of sludge. Everyday life takes at least a little bit of courage, that mysterious, strong force that keeps us going.

Courage, to me, is living with actions and intentions, and living with the intentions to truly live, and embrace life, and strive for the beauty, and walk in the light.

What are your thoughts on courage? 

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