“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.” William Arthur Ward
There are so many ways to be right and to be wrong but life is beyond being right and wrong. The third path is wisdom which is where we try to be truly aligned with reality beyond our expectations and projections. Expectations are what make an optimist or a pessimist. One expects things to be good and hope rather than taking an action and the other expects things to never work out so he walks away before even trying. Very often we find it hard to quieten your inner doubter and just assist as the situations requires.
To move towards wisdom is to look inside out, and in between yourself, and face the beauty and the beast inside, and that requires real courage. Either you really desire the truth that your courage is foolish as a child entranced by the flame, curiosity acts before knowledge and he/she touches the fire not knowing the pain of burning. You are never courageous if you are not scared. If you are that corgeous and wise then you don’t keep pumping in every flame without preparation. But why is it so hard to look inside ourselves and confront fear?
Truth doesn’t need to be hard to face, but the truth we deny indicate that there is a fear of meeting with it, because otherwise why have you been refusing it, hiding from it, going unaware lifetime? Courage enables action when a frightened part of you is active and so you get in a defensive position.
Some courageous actions are noble, such as risking injury to save another, and some are not, such as attempting to impress others by doing something daring or unsafe. That child who touches the flame follow his own desire but we adults often burn ourselves just because we seek confirmation from outside.
Fear-generated courage (unexamined courage)
Fear might generate false courage challenging frightened parts of your personality. Escaping and running away is a false sense of courage, or the shadow side of courage. Sometimes we want to be accepted, admired, or successful that we cut through accepting, admiring and succeeding within.
Love- generated courage (wise courage)
Love generates courage when you challenge a frightened part of yourself in order to benefit another or to create authentic power within yourself. That is real courage. It takes so much more courage to challenge a frightened part of ourselves that wants to hide in shouting, judging, resenting, and withdrawing. Creating authentic power requires real courage.
Carl Jung explain that nicely in his book , The Undiscovered Self, connecting the micro individual escaping mechanism to the macro political.
“It is in the nature of political bodies always to see evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else.” Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self
To be able to be courageous with love we need to learn how to be intimate with life and our own experience and that means integrity. Integrity is honoring the knowledge you receive about yourself in every new situation, to face the weak parts and the strong ones and learn how to be true to yourself and others without losing being in touch with reality as it is. Integrity is different from morality. Conscience and morality is the sense of what you should do in order to honor the expectations of your culture or others.
Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. Ware writes of the phenomenal clarity of vision that people gain at the end of their lives. We indeed waste life not finding answers to our deepest desires lost in the illusion that we live for ever. Death can be actually a wise messenger reminding us to stop wasting life thinking “When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently,” common themes surfaced again and again in Wares survey. She ranks them according to their most common to lesser.
- I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
- I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
- I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
- I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
- I wish that I had let myself be happier.
Do not get caught in the prison of fear. You wonder, how and where do I start? Ask yourself where do you repeatedly get stuck ith a strong repeated emotional reaction, repeated suffering ,recurrent fear, shame, sadness maybe those arise within or in relationship to other person, a partner, a friend, at work?
Truth might be hiding on the surface of persisting feeling of rejection, feeling of something going to go wrong, or a thought or believe you keep holding on (life is unfair was one of my dear believe that enabled me to not feel the pain of lost and keep trying). Now you want to really face it, what does these feelings and believes does for you? Do they make it easier to quit, to run away, to hate, to give up?
Can you notice when this pattern arise? Where are mostly stuck and ask what is it the story of this fear based place? What do you believe about yourself when you are there? Are you not loved, not strong enough, not good enough? Is the other not good enough again, not nice enough again? Is the world not fair again and magic-less often?
What expectations you build on the outcomes of this experience? Are you unworthy, not loveable,, you going to fail, you going to lose someone respect, or approval, or you are way better that others to care to explain yourself? Is that what you need to believe in order not to try out? All shiny things are not fire; it takes courage to touch the flame after you been hurt once.
Ask yourself if that believe is true? Rumi call this limitation of belives; the fear of thinking, as if we scared to reason with ourselves, as if we are scared to think. Judging things on their surfaces is always easier that researching for a more wholesome truth. Sometimes it become accurate to ask yourself, do you want to grow and get stronger or you want to have it easy always? When you grow you will eventually become strong and things become easy but if you never do the work then you just live in false easness where you are only escaping meeting who you might become. Someone who are capable to be true but you won’t allow because you have a misbelieve being true is being naive?
If aspects of the person remain undigested, cut off, denied, projected, rejected, indulged, or otherwise unassimilated, they become the points around which the core forces of greed, hatred and delusion attach themselves. When we immerse ourselves in desire without guilt, shame or clinging, it can show us something special about our own nature that allows us to embrace life fully.
