Last update: February 02, 2018
Osho said that first of all there is courage and everything else comes later. Then there is sincerity, when it takes effort. Then there is love, when circumstances prove adverse. Then trust, when someone disappoints us. Then come the costume and the audacity of the investigator to explore the reality that surrounds him, that surrounds us.
Well bravery can actually be a great start, but the truth is, not everything else comes later. There is always something that comes first. This something is fear. Because there are few brave people without fear, without improvement, without indirectly presuming defeat. We can say, therefore, that fear is the forging of the brave on a cold night in which one is assailed by doubts.
"Difficulties do not prevent you from daring, it is not daring that generates difficulties."
-Arthur Schopenhauer-
Fear and courage flow into everyday heroes
A fear that appears when we have to tell a friend that we lied to him, that it was we who once spoke ill of him. That it was we who made hasty judgments, who discouraged him when he told us that dream that excited him so much. The truth is that it cost us a lot to imagine him without the usual jokes, to strip him of his most common defects and to think that he could have worked on him so that they did not constitute an insurmountable obstacle. He had failed so many times that we had stopped giving him an opportunity.
A fear that appears when someone changes the frequency with which our heart beats. Illuminated butterflies that stifle the words that can't get out of our mouth. In our declaration, without wanting to, we always put part of our pride, and we try to put the best of ourselves. We imagine the situation a thousand times and we do not want at all in the world that what comes from our bowels fall to the ground. And there is no other place, other than a declaration of love, in which hope, prayer and request are united in this way.
A suspicion that comes when we betray ourselves. Someone walking next to us disappears and brings with them a lot of lists that we had drawn up together and also those that we had drawn up… On our own and at our own risk. If he takes them away and partly leaves us naked, because whatever paper we write on from now on seems to become opaque in believing in what we write. And we say no, a thousand times no, angry because we don't want to go up and then suddenly fall. Maybe boredom and apathy reign after all, but at least they mask the pain better than a sip of gin at two in the morning.
The woman trembles as she tells her friend that she has reached a position she never imagined. That what began as a threat accompanied by a sinister smile is now a set of blows that form a hole, black, from which the sun's rays are kept further and further away.
Now she is like that woman the news is talking about with her face made up for beating, the one from whom he has always distanced himself because he did not accept that one day she might find herself in the same situation. She feels that she has betrayed all the people around her, one by one, so that they would not discover the reason for her insomnia. All for a love that, having become a quagmire, had already swallowed her body and was about to strangle her soul.
She speaks little, looks down, because she can barely verbalize situations bigger than her. She doesn't know what she did to get her mates to trip her when she passes, kick her backpack, or fill her sandwich with sand. She knows no words to tell the people she loves most that the child they brag so much about is a sad child living amidst threats too great for him.
The woman cries as she has to go home and tell her family that they just fired her. He also cries his childhood friend who has been looking for a job for two years and on his way has found only people interested in taking advantage of his misfortune, who is left with those savings now administered with the fear that one day very close they will end. A day that, if it continues like this, will come soon. Tomorrow both she and he will go out, curriculum in hand, and their experience will be worth little or nothing, because it is only for young people who do not have it, but maybe they will have luck, or rather, justice.
Courage: intelligence, before daring
The truth is that we are surrounded by brave, silent, kind, integrated. We are also surrounded by people who can be if we offer them our resources for a moment. Our time, our desires, our hopes, our voice and our words. If we say we believe in them and don't stop giving them opportunities for redemption.
Before courage there is fear, and between the two, between the stimulus and the attitude, there is intelligence. Because most of the brave, at least those who survive, have a certain amount of audacity, but they have an even greater amount of intelligence. An intelligence that has nothing to do with closing your eyes and jumping into the void, but with opening them to bring awareness in the most critical moments. Courage allows creativity, the liberation of intuition and the reflection of those messages that arise from our instincts.
From intelligent courage comes pride and a distinct gaze towards fear, towards which respect is not lost, but which is seen in another way. He stops being the enemy to become an ally, a warning sign indicating the points on which perhaps we should put a point of caution. This does not mean that they stop us, but that we stop briefly to reassess the situation.
Brave clever people populate the world, talking, supporting and feeding their faith above what others may think… And they do it simply because they think that what they want is worth more than the fear that the obstacle that awaits them can instill in them.
"We must know the enemy"
-Sun Tzu-
