“True honesty requires courage, character, and integrity. (It is) a very expensive gift; don’t expect it from cheap people.” — Frank Caprio, municipal court judge
I’m starting to think the most important aspect of change is courage. Of my Big Three elements for successful counseling—courage, commitment, and honesty—courage must come first, not necessarily in importance but in time. It’s courage that you need to get started, and what you need when you don’t know what to do. It’s courage that you need to make a change when you’re not sure what will result.
Dragons
The myth of the dragon is a metaphor for courage. We’ll do all we can to avoid the dragon as no truly capable person looks for trouble, but the dragon represents what is unavoidable. You don’t understand the dragon and, unlike the sphinx, the dragon is not testing your intellect. In the myth of the dragon you are always under powered.
I have been in situations that required courage, but cannot say the risks were necessary or well advised. It’s much easier to accept a risk that you have created for yourself than it is to confront danger that you didn’t ask for. But in either case, you’re forced to develop balance and resilience.
True courage takes a calm, dispassionate state of mind; it is entirely different from being heroic. When important things are happening quickly you cannot be distracted by extraneous thoughts. The reward of surviving a life-threatening gauntlet is learning to find and maintain a complete, balanced, and unbiased focus.
Soldiers
This is what soldiers are trained to do, but most simply endure without achieving a courageous state of mind. The ones who do go beyond endurance enter a transcendental calm. I encountered these qualities in people who were members of the Special Forces, and I feel I achieved this state of mind when I passed through life threatening situations in the mountains. It’s these character-testing situations that draw people into high-risk sports.
It was a desire to return to these kinds of situations that led to my meeting ex-soldiers who had become mountaineers. Their stories of calmly risking their lives to complete a mission echoed my mountaineering objectives and the attitudes of our climbing teams.
More than once I’ve heard climbers who were marrying say they hoped their life partners would be as reliable as their climbing partners, but this never comes to pass. The situations are too different and the commitments are neither as clear nor as conscious. In climbing, “until death do us part” is real and unquestioned. Few marriages display anything similar.
Responsibility is Not Heroic
For ideas on how to be more courageous:
