Courage or Cowardice
We are all our hurled outside of our comfort zones repeatedly throughout our lives. Whether a major life decision, a relationship conflict, or a professional crisis, life suddenly feels threatening and overwhelming. We are terrified that if we make the wrong move, that if we don’t adequately protect ourselves, we will lose one or more of our core human needs: love, safety, and belonging. Tara Brach calls this “meeting our edge.”
Each time we meet our edge we are faced with a simple, fundamental decision. We can choose the path of courage, or we can choose the path of cowardice. The path of courage requires us to step out of our habitual defense, to resist the urge to cling to certainty and comfort, to endure pain and fear to reach a better outcome. The path of cowardice means that we once more retreat into our cocoon, even if our world inside its fragile coating is small and suffocating.
We all hop between these paths. There are no heroes and no cowards, there are only messy, imperfect humans sometimes making heroic choices and sometimes making cowardly ones. One way to think about the arc of our brief time in this life is to gradually make more courageous choices each time we meet our edge, and to forgive ourselves more quickly and fully when we make cowardly choices.
It can be fiendishly hard to know what the courageous path is. Every person and situation is different. A courageous choice for me may be the cowardly one for you in the exact same situation. This difference flows partly from our personalities and histories, particularly what Will Storr calls our “theories of control.” These are, in short, those cocoons we desperately weave around ourselves in childhood to help us feel safe and stable in a terrifying, uncertain world.
One of my most powerful theories of control was peacemaking. I instinctually acquiesce to and comfort more powerful, demanding people to prevent them from becoming upset at me, thereby protecting the child terrified of his father’s booming anger who is still buried in my neurons. Other people have the opposite theory of control: they have secured their safety throughout their life by fighting back, by defying or demanding more from others.
The decisions in life that matter most require the paradox of the middle way, a mix of defiance and acceptance, resistance and surrender, of solving for our own needs and others’. Few of us naturally start in that middle way. The uncomfortable, sometimes agonizing, steps we need to reach it depend on our starting point. For me, those hard, courageous steps usually require more defiance, more assertion of my own perspective, since my starting point has been so conciliatory. For others, it is more conceding and compromising. There are many theories of control and many spectrums like this: listening versus expressing, acting quickly versus acting deliberatively, and so on. We can only know the courageous choice if we deeply understand where we naturally rest on each of those spectrums.
It may seem odd to call surrender courageous. We are fed stories of heroic defiance from a young age, of battles fought and won against impossible odds, of sacrificing everything to defeat the evil wizard. Even our more prosaic professional stories are saturated with defiance. We hear that Steve Jobs held his vision and resisted naysayers through dark and difficult years. For some, the courageous path is to be more like Jobs, to hold the course through the storm while others are screaming to turn back. For others, though, the courageous step is to pause, listen, and change course before they sink the ship.
Acceptance can be brutally hard. It often feels like a kind of death. It may mean the death of a company or a job or a relationship. But only by accepting that death can we build something brighter and better from the ashes. That is where the courage comes in. Our deepest selves usually know when something has died—it takes courage to listen to them and let go.
Our culture is shifting. It is now more the norm, at least in our WEIRD little corner of the world, to encourage rest and acceptance over striving and defiance. But everything is paradox, everything is the middle way. Individuals and cultures can tip too far to begin making cowardly choices on the other side of any spectrum. Surrendering too much is cowardly for me, but so would being too indiscriminately defiant and demanding. Navigating the middle way is an art requiring constant attention, reflection, and iteration.
A small example of cultural overcorrection is the recent Disney movie Strange World. It is a blunt rejection of classic hero narratives, with the protagonist resisting his explorer father’s call to venture boldly beyond the horizon and instead settling to become a small farmer and destroying the electricity grid that is harming their living planet. It is just a children’s movie, of course, but it probably should be noted to all the kids watching it that actually surrendering our electricity would mean the death and immiseration of millions of people and that shaming all the defiant explorers and entrepreneurs would cost the lives of millions more as new medicines and other life-changing products went undiscovered and undistributed. Everything. Is. Paradox.
If knowing the courageous choice requires us to first know ourselves, then perhaps some of the most important choices of all are whether to walk the inner journey towards self-understanding and self-acceptance. There are dozens and dozens of choices along that path, most of them frightening and exhausting. But like all journeys, it begins with a first choice: do we have the courage to stir within our cocoon, to imagine our lives beyond it, and to begin the slow, messy, sometimes agonizing process of breaking free of it. We are all called to that metamorphosis at times in our life—hopefully we all have the courage to answer it.