I’ve feel like I’ve been writing a lot about fear, so I thought that today I should write about one of its most powerful antidotes: courage. Actually, that’s not quite right. Courage isn’t so much an antidote to fear as something that helps you live with and even use the fear for good. But courage doesn’t make fear go away.

When I was younger, I used to think, as many of us do, that having courage meant not being afraid anymore. That I had to wait to do things I was afraid of until they didn’t scare me anymore. Now I know that courage is being afraid and doing it anyway. And I knew that for a long time before I started being able to show up, at least sometimes, for myself and others with courage. Because procrastination is fear’s close sibling. Yeah, I would say to myself, I know I need to be courageous and do that thing anyway even though I’m scared to, but I’m too busy today. I’ll wait until tomorrow. That’s fine, except for the pesky little fact that we do, of course, eventually run out of tomorrows, and we don’t ever know exactly when that will happen. Cliche, maybe, but nonetheless a hard truth that I think about a lot. (I’ll save that topic for a later post, though.) So, we’re left with a bit of a problem, then. What to do? Well, for a long time, I’ve believed that some of us (many of us?) only start pursuing our dreams when the fear of not pursuing them becomes greater than the fear of pursuing them. So we may indeed be able to put it off until tomorrow, again, but we can’t stand to do that anymore.

Courage doesn’t have to mean just doing the things you need to do to pursue your lifelong dream, though. Courage can take many forms. Sometimes it’s just surviving–getting through the day after the loss of a loved one or when you are in a deep depression or difficult situation. Sometimes it’s continuing to hope when you have no reason to (hoping doesn’t seem like it should be a scary thing to do, but it certainly can be). Sometimes it’s simply showing up despite not knowing what to do once there or whether you even should have showed up.

The realization of courage is a thing of beauty, like a work of art. Our lives are enriched and our spirits elevated by its display, and its brilliance radiates farther than we can know. We should never underestimate the power of courage to effect change, in ourselves and the world around us.