Nicholas Higgins 05/06/2020

Take Courage

‘Fortes Fortuna Adiuvat’

What comes to mind? Most likely tales of brave soldiers charging up a hill amid whizzing bullets. Certainly, these are great examples of overcoming our strongest biological drive, self preservation. In our safe and plentiful modern world, however, opportunities for this kind of courage are scarce. If a modern person wants to show off some bravery today, they must purposely seek it out by signing up for military combat or taking part in extreme sports.

Yet courage not only dwells in a theatre of war. History is filled with great men of ‘intellectual courage’, like Socrates, Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon and Charles Darwin. Others, like Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi displayed excellent ‘moral courage’. All followed what they believed to be right, regardless of the cost to themselves and irrespective of the disapproval of others. Without individuals like this the world would retrograde. Civilisation would turn backward. Because of their courage to think differently and stand up for their ideas, society advanced and improved.

We might argue that what unites all these people is their ‘courage’. But courage is not a device or magical power implanted in lucky individuals at birth, it’s nothing more than an invented word to describe someone’s attitude to fear. All of these men were afraid, but instead of letting their fear conquer them, they overcame it, they acted in spite of it. To use Mandela’s phrase: ‘courage is not the absence of fear but the triumph over it’. Not that you’d know this from looking around Western culture that celebrates ‘fearlessness’ (over 50 books with this tittle on Amazon alone). Acting without fear is just foolhardy recklessness. Feeling fear but acting anyway is true courage.

Now fear, or dread, fright, panic, alarm, terror or trepidation, is a common denominator for all humanity. Whilst the primal fear of bodily harm has greatly lessened, in today’s concrete jungle, fear has mutated and morphed into equally insidious forms. Buoyed by social media and a militant news media, fear roams into every part of our being; fear of judgement, fear of failure, fear of missing out, fear of loneliness, fear of poverty. Sometimes they’re real, but usually they’re either exaggerated or imagined.

It’s this ubiquity of fear that makes courage more relevant than ever. You don’t need to wait for war to break out (like Churchill did), or for a colonial oppressor to arrive at the shore (like Gandhi did). Don’t be fooled that courage is the preserve of an elite few, or reserved for extraordinary circumstances. Courage can be exercised day to day. By not faltering or despairing among the battles of daily life. By confronting those seemingly inescapable fears that plague us day and night. This is the courage summoned not in excitement or moments of crisis, but in the hourly perils and the continual conflicts of the everyday.

Most crippling among these fears is the fear of uncertainty. It holds you back from taking risks, and this shoots down your potential, stifles growth, and shackles you to a life of il-content and dissatisfaction. Heroes would not be heroes if they did not take risks. MLK chanced being thrown in prison for his beliefs. Charles Darwin gambled his whole career on his new theories. By not making peace with the Nazis, Churchill risked an entire German invasion of the United Kingdom.

’‘Who Dares Wins’, so the SAS motto goes. More risk, more reward, no risk, no reward. For a generation who’ve been raised by hyper-protective parents, soft-surface playgrounds, and then taught in universities with ‘safe spaces’, this is much needed advice . Without risk, you might as well watch the world and life go by from the comfort of your couch. Why launch a business when it might go bust? Why go for a job interview when you could be rejected? Why ask that girl out when she might fob you off? We fear risk because it’s an open door to the great unknown, which is unclear and worse yet, out of our control.

Courage is the great means by which we might look through that door. Of course remaining with the status quo is easy, soft, definitely not scary. Doomsters and gloomsters will tell you ‘to play it safe’. Cynics, hypocrites, and troublemakers, will resort to mockery and ridicule. Don’t’ make a change or take a chance, they say, keep your head down and your mouth closed.  Refute these naysayers! Take courage like heroes of old and march into uncharted territory.

I think it’s good that fear is implacably tied to risk. Fears are usually a calling card to something we care about. They’re a signal of something deep down we know we should do. I recently worked in China for example. An endeavour that was wracked with risk, ‘how long until you’re locked up in a Chinese internment camp?’, my friends taunted me. But having since returned to the UK, how grateful I am that I summoned the courage to go. Turns out I didn’t end up in the clink, had a great time, and matured enormously, something I always knew needed to happen but had always reeled from. By following the fear, I’d grown. As T. S. Eliot put it, ‘only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go’.

Have you ever sensed that palpable feeling of disquiet on a morning commute? That deep rumbling of discontent? I can’t help but feel it’s because they’ve willfully accepted their lot. They’ve been cowed into submission by their fears, never dared to expose themselves to the perils of chance, never brought forth the courage to take a risk. These are comfortable lives of wasted opportunity. They’ll end up like the man on his deathbed who wishes he’d had the courage to be himself. Who mourns that he did not dream bigger. Who laments that he never did the things he really wanted to do. If only he had the courage to not listen to everyone else, and take the road less travelled? 

This is a timorous, furtive and spiritless life. What Aristotle would call the way of the coward, ‘who basely flies from an enemy who he has not the spirit to encounter’. A brave soldier might lose his battle. You may lose, just as you may win, and you may fall just as you may rise. But so what? Better to have tried and lost, than never to have tried at all. As has been said in a previous post, it’s only by tasting failure that the greatest lessons are learned. It’s for good reason that bankruptcy is considered a rite of passage in the entrepreneurial world.

This is not an advocacy for being blind and impulsive. This is like a drunkard who runs into a burning house, he’s stupid, not courageous. Rather to embrace calculated and measured risk. This is the clear eyed hero, ‘who makes his way, with every sense alert and every nerve strung, into the hell of the flames to rescue some little child’ (Dyke). So screw your courage to the sticking place, jump into the unknown and stare fear in the face. Like the Lion in the Wizard of Oz, you already have courage. You don’t need to find it; you only need to access it. This is an enobling act that will lift up the whole of life.