Photo:12019/Pixabay
Each and every day, life presents us with challenges; those that try our patience, those that cause anger, those that scare us. And depending on what we face, we handle them in various ways and keep moving through our lives. Much of what ‘challenges’ us does so because there is often fear behind our reaction. Things such as ‘Am I going to get through this?’ ‘What will people think of me when they find out?’ Or ‘Will this cause me to lose my job?’ All things that make us pause, think a bit more deeply than simpler questions demand of us, and make a decision. As humans, there is a strong desire to stay safe and keep ourselves alive, and things that scare us are connected to those fears that things may change and not for the better.
George Bernard Shaw said that progress—hope—depends on the courage of the unreasonable man. The man that walks into the arena to face the lion, the one that swims out into the ocean to save the one who was not paying attention to the currents, the one who simply looks fear in the eye and does not flinch. Yet, all of us, at some time, have made the decision that ‘it is too much,’ for us to handle. Yet Shaw’s ‘unreasonable man’ is the reason things change for the better. All those expressions like ‘The tall flower gets cut down.’ or, ‘no one has ever done that’ can be taken in many different ways, though. Certainly, the way many of us understand them is that we are not to take the risk, challenge the authority, or upset the cart. Because people will not like it, and they will then blame us. If we truly believe these sayings, and many of us do, good would never triumph over evil, the status quo would never be challenged, and nothing would ever improve. Can you imagine? Living in a world where nothing changes? Where the powerful always win? Where the powerless always lose?
This is where the expression ‘ordinary people doing extraordinary things’ reminds us that while we can choose courage ourselves, sometimes we believe in something so much that courage chooses us and we find ourselves doing things we never would believe we could do, yet there we are, doing them. It’s one thing to be scared of something or someone, yet it’s another thing entirely to live in fear of them. What most people generally want in life is actually on the other side of fear. Which means we need to rise above our fears, our doubts, our lack of training or education, and simply do it. Instead of making a choice to be afraid and avoiding the challenge in front of us, a better tack is to decide on what action we will take. It can be small or it can be large, but actually doing something to address what is perplexing us helps build our own confidence, which leads to the realization that there are other things that we might be able to do as well.
These are extraordinary decisions, big and small, and they are our baby-stepping stones to learning what we are capable of doing and of living the life we always thought we would live. To rise above our fears and say…’Yes, I will try.’
