I will put it this way today: courage is staying in the fight.
And here is the thing: it is one thing to stay in the Big Fight, when people are depending on you, when you incur shame if you fail, and glory if you succeed. This applies obviously to war and other forms of violence, but also to a fight for, whatever, that involves other people.
But the main fight I am talking about is the fight to remain true to your values even when it is difficult. People used to talk, in this country, about this sort of fight all the time. They talked about integrity and wisdom and character.
Those seem in some places now to be forgotten, and in others to be White People Values, which would be something I would gladly claim, if some idiot wants to cede the gateways to happiness to me and people like me. That leaves, for such people, moral scraps from the table that they can add to the economic scraps. It’s a quick route to poverty in all respects.
But what I would say is that it is EASY and INVISIBLE when you give up certain fights. For me to give up the fight for healing would be invisible to most people. I would still be me, and those who like me as I am would continue to do so.
BUT I WOULD KNOW. So in these long term daily, even hourly fights, the battle is with delusion, detachment, quitting. And in this arena most quitting happens as self deception, when you just start pretending that something you valued was never important to you. It takes a microsecond. As I say, it can be made to disappear. You forget you ever cared, and then forget that you forgot. It’s done. Down the memory hole.
So resisting this process is what I will call courage today.
My progress lately has mainly consisted in beginning to grasp at a somatic, physical level just how much pain I have been living with.
And it seems to me if you enter this pain, dare it to hurt you more, embrace it, then you begin to win the fight. That is what seems to be happening with me.
It’s really, really hard. But that is the point of courage. You don’t need courage to lay in bed and binge watch TV while eating Cheetos. You need courage to confront honestly what it is in you that views that life denying process as better than feeling whatever it is you are suppressing.
I think I’ve figured out in some detail what happened to me, and the overarching psychology of it all. That has been a hard part: I have major PTSD, but I don’t even know what happened to me, since it seemingly happened before I could form long term memories.
But I was born with a good mind, and a constitution able to withstand enormous damage, and I think I’ve sorted it out. Processing it is another story, but I think I can get this done.
And I get short moments of lightness, in a good way, an airiness, and a sense of space, all of which feel good. So many of us live lives where it feels like “the world” is pressing in somehow, and that there is never enough time.
There is always enough time. Perhaps not to meet others expectations, but certainly to work effectively to the limits of your physical stamina without feeling rushed or stressed. If your body is in the fight in a consistent way, there is no need to add anxiety.
And I would say that in important respects life IS work. It just is. What will feel good to you remembering at the end of your life will be conscious, purposive activity of the mind, emotions or body. It’s work walking around Disneyland. It’s work watching a football game attentively. It’s even work having a spirited conversation about anything at a bar. It takes focus.
Some things the energy just flows easily, and in other cases it doesn’t. What a huge difference in the quality of all our lives it would be if each of us could bring a spirit of acceptance and fun to whatever it is we do to make money. If you are going to call it a “living”, you might as well live while doing it, and living is not rejecting drudgery, even if it truly could be viewed as unpleasant. Somewhere out there are happy sausage makers, and happy latrine cleaners.