One More To Go

I can only think of a few times in my life that I witnessed my dad reacting to a situation in fury: one of those times was on Halloween night when I was about 11 years old.  

That night, for the first time, my parents had allowed me to go trick-or-treating with my friends, without an adult.  When we had knocked on enough doors to fill our pillowcases with enough candy that we were ready to call it a night, we went back to my friend Curt's house about a quarter of a mile away from my house, and then we all left from there to go home for the night.

I think some kids' parents picked them up and other kids walked or rode their bikes in a different direction than the way I went.  I hopped on my bike and headed off toward my house under the patchy beams of the streetlights. When I was about eight houses away from my own, I saw my dog trotting towards me; when she saw me, she turned and ran alongside my bike.  We continued along that way until suddenly from out of the shadows came two people wearing costumes and masks.  Both had a can of shaving cream, which they squirted into their hands and threw at my dog and me, chasing after us and doing the same thing over and over again until both my dog and I were covered in soapy foam.

By the time we'd made it to my driveway, I was crying, both out of shock and anger and because the shaving cream that was running into my eyes was stinging.  My dad was in the kitchen when I came in.  He looked up and saw me crying, and I saw his jaw clench as he stood up.  After I had told him what had happened, he told my mom to get a towel for me and my dog, and then he stepped outside and slammed the door behind him.  I wasn't sure what he was planning to do: it wasn't too often that he saw me crying or that he slammed a door like that.

I was still trying to get the shaving cream out of my hair a little bit later when the front doorbell rang.  When my mom and I answered the door, we saw two boys standing on the front porch just in front of my dad. After they sheepishly looked in my direction and told me they were sorry, my dad quietly said, "You still have one more to go" and then he marched them around to the side of the house and my mom and I heard them apologize to my dog.

I'm not sure what has made this event stick out in my memory for so many years: it wasn't the first time that I had seen my dad stick up for someone who needed help, and it wasn't the last.  It was one of a handful of times that I can remember him jumping in and fighting a battle for me, though, instead of encouraging me to handle it myself, and, although I don't think I ever told him, I appreciated the way he handled it because it somehow didn't leave me feeling ashamed or afraid.  

The good old days, when kids created their own costumes out of old clothes and scraps of material - or, as in my sister Nancy's case, they just wore their superhero underwear

Courage

"Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities ... because it is the quality which guarantees all others." ~Sir Winston Churchill

When I was a freshman in college, I took a class during which we learned how to rappel.  The culmination of the instruction of that part of the class was that each student had an opportunity to descend by rope from the top of a tower that stood three stories high. 

At the beginning of the semester, in my 18 year-old mind, that endeavor didn't seem to me like it was going to be too tough.  I wasn't scared of heights, and I was in pretty good physical condition.  I listened carefully to the instructor talk about the technique and the safety information, and I watched videos of others rappelling.  When the day of the descent finally arrived, I confidently climbed up to the top of the tower, hooked in to the roping gear, and backed up to the edge.  And then I looked down - and that's when the fear hit me.

I tried in vain to talk myself into stepping off the ledge for several minutes.  The instructor, who had positioned another instructor at the top, shouted words of encouragement to me from down below.  My legs just wouldn't move.  Finally, the guy at the top said, "The longer you stand there, the harder it's going to get to take that first step.  On my count of three, you're going to step off.  One, two, ..."  I took a deep breath, and I did it.  The warmth of the sun on my face, the feeling of gliding so freely, and the big burst of adrenaline all hit me at once, and I loved it.  It was, in the true sense of the word, awesome.  

But the best part of the descent was at the bottom, and it came from the words spoken by the instructor, words that I have thought about many times since that day:  "And that," he said as he turned from watching me to address the rest of the class,  "is a perfect example of the difference between courage and bravery.  Bravery is something a person can be born with, but courage is something we have to dig deep to find.  It's natural and often even smart to be afraid, but, as long as you are prepared, you can't let that stop you from forging ahead - and that's courage."

Before that day, I had never considered that there was a difference at all between courage and bravery; I actually thought they were synonyms.  Upon further consideration, though, I began to see that there is a distinction between those two words.  Bravery is the ability to confront pain or danger when one is not afraid.  Courage, on the other hand, is the ability to take on a difficult situation or pain in spite of the presence of fear.  Courage requires using a thought process in order to overcome a natural emotion; it is the willful choice to forge ahead regardless of the possible consequences.  A courageous person understands the risks of the task but is driven to participate anyway for a greater purpose.  

From my perspective, there are a couple of different types of courage:  Physical Courage, which often involves overcoming fear of the risk of pain or death to do things - like rappelling, getting up to try again after falling off a bike, running into a burning building to rescue someone, climbing a mountain, or undergoing a medical procedure.  Here's a video that gives a great example of physical courage (it's 17 minutes long but well worth taking the time to view it!):

And then there is Mental Courage, which may involve doing something that poses a risk of something negative socially happening, like embarrassment or rejection.  This includes things like standing up to a bully, giving a speech to a crowd, disregarding peer pressure, and being a leader.  It also encompasses ethics and doing the right thing, even when that puts one at risk for consequences such as disapproval of others.  It's pushing past a fear of rejection to put oneself "out there" by being true to one's own beliefs and essentially to oneself.  And that is how courage is linked to the most bonding of human traits: vulnerability.  A person who has the courage to accept that he isn't perfect but the depth to love himself and to see himself as worthy anyway not only ends up being a happier person but also gains a different kind of strength than cannot be gained in any other way.  And, in accepting himself as an imperfect being, he shows others that variances - and vulnerability - are the essence of the beauty of life.  

What I have taken away from that is the understanding that courage has to do with perspective and with the way we adapt to the challenges and to the circumstances of our lives.  

Without a doubt, what my dad had a great amount of physical courage, and I think that was likely something about him that a lot of people noticed and admired.  What I have found to be even more impressive about him, though, and what I hope to go out having had is the courage to be imperfect, the compassion to be kind to oneself and to others, the conviction to stand up for myself and for people and things that are important to me, and, last but not least, the courage and the confidence to show vulnerability, which, really, is the thing that connects us as human beings. Vulnerability, like the imperfections seen in granite, is what makes people unique, memorable, and beautiful.