Would you like to quit your job, find a new path, leave the person who is holding you back? But you dare not do it because you are afraid. You are afraid that you will regret your decision, that you will make a mistake, you are afraid of not finding a replacement for everything that you are going to leave. This fear is well founded; moreover, it is necessary for courage.
Courage is when you go forward in spite of fear. Courage is not the absence of fear; being brave means not being afraid of your own fear.
Be careful: courage causes envy. A lot of people will try to stop you. You will be told that it is impossible, that many before you have already tried and failed. Against your dreams, they will expose the conjuncture, the situation on the market, the world order. But it is all that your courage can change. Courage reopens the world, reshapes reality. As Vladimir Yankelevich wrote, courage is the virtue of undertaking. The virtue that makes all others possible. Do you believe in justice? It takes courage to fight for it. Are you living in love? You will need courage for love to triumph. It is a virtue that feeds itself. But the chain of our little weaknesses and concessions gradually reduces our ability to be brave. And vice versa, even the most modest acts of resistance give us strength for big things (as in the film «Laws of the Market» directed by Stefan Brize)1.
Is it time for us to be bold? Not particularly. We do not have enough values in the name of which it would be possible to gather strength and rush into battle. But even more our courage is threatened by the obsession with results, the cult of results. At least listen to politicians: they endlessly report on their achievements, because they simply do not have the courage to imagine the future. Courage is not always attainable. He who is preoccupied with the result will not be able to find courage in himself: the possibility of failure paralyzes him, and therefore he will always prefer to pass off his cowardice as caution. He doesn’t understand that courage actually always wins, even when it doesn’t «succeed». Every time we show courage, we cultivate our will and our freedom. Of course, we can fail. But real failure is never risking failure under any circumstances. Because then we will meet death with longing and horror: after all, we have lived life without daring to become ourselves. And then we will understand that lack of courage costs us much more than courage.
1 In theaters May 19, 2016.