C Our Age

Spoonful of Courage helps my typos go down.

It’s funny how tiny pebbles, each about the weight of an Advil, can be combined and manipulated with other ingredients to create an impenetrable castle wall with the strength of an anvil.   Incidentally, a rock made of predominately pebbles, and concrete, is called a conglomerate.  Okay, perhaps my analogy and loquaciousness is taking me away from my point.  Let’s see:  little things, when added together, can turn into much larger – and more difficult to manipulate – things.  And if you can skip pebbles across a pond, please do not pat yourself on the back when you choose instead to a heave a conglomerate a foot off the shore.   

My real point: courage is often mislabeled. 

If courage is mislabeled (or, rather, used liberally to describe our actions), than what is it?  I'd say whatever it is, it often goes unnoticed when it occurs in others.  Yet, if we truly look for it, I venture it is likely available to our eyes in the same quantity as perspective.  I think we miss it, because we are often mislead to think that we have it ourselves on a daily basis.  And we get caught up in this, and miss it when it's gleaming from the eyes of someone standing in front of us.  

  

If I put things off, and allow them to go-unchecked, a tide of anxiety and even shyness can make their completion look and feel impossible.  Of course, it’s a culmination of things.  It’s not the pebble, it’s the ... anvil.  I don’t really have a problem with all of this, life gets in its own way.  But I often feel slightly more accomplished when I tick off these, let’s call them put-off things.  This slightly more accomplished feeling is sometimes masked as courage, which I know it is not.  I am beginning to think we have an inherent interest in procrastinating, (mis)prioritizing, and perusing (Mommy Bistro) as we see fit. 

Courage cannot be that moment when we decide to do those little things in our lives that we have put off.  It’s bigger than that, because it has to be.  I know it when I see it.  And when I see courage, I have to tell you it gives me the butterflies and reminds me of how special we all are.  On the flip side towards the rant, it’s the flippant rewards we give ourselves as we strikethrough exponential increases in dread and anxiety only  the result of our own procrastination (this is the loquaciousness I spoke of earlier).  A long awaited trip to the dentist will learn you that.  

Make that phone call you have been dreading.  Go visit that fringe.   Change from aol to gmail, and plant your garden.  Do these things not because they are courageous, but because they may just give you a spoon full of courage to help the medicine go down.  And by medicine, I mean everything else in our lives that leads us to put off these small rewards to begin with.

I’m talking to myself here.  I’m no advocate, I’m not Paulo.  I have seen courage, today.  And when you see it, save it, be true to it, and never mistake it for anything less, because it is truly beautiful.


*NO Analogies Were Harmed In This Post (so I say)