Courage is perhaps the most time sensitive of all attributes that we can behold and deploy! Use it wisely, at the right time and in the right proportion, it can work wonders, any imbalance in that deployment, either with the timing or the proportionality and you will in all probability end up more exhausted and famished rather than feeling like a victor! Join me here as we explore what makes courage so elusive and slippery to work with and why when it works it creates history more often than not!

Unlike what the normal belief is, courage is nothing glamorous and neither is it an unfolding moment; courage is actually the manifestation of all that you are in that moment of action! Courage is all your experience, knowledge, wisdom, intelligence and intuition applied in that moment to engage with what is coming your way- by exercising the choice for the style of engagement! Courage has never been about being that fluke of eccentric voyeurism and risk taking behaviour rather it has always been about calibrating the risks and working always towards avoiding and dealing with minimal risk at all times! So you may now want to ask, if this is what it is, then why have people glorified and written pages and pages through history about courage? Well it sells! Let me explain!

How would you feel if a military general told you that he won the war because he trained well, or how would you feel if the doctor told you that his exceptional skills at operating sick people came to him by hard work and training, or how about that school teacher- if the teacher told you that dealing with kids and educating them is what they are thoroughly trained for!- Well nothing inspires here, right- they are doing all that they are supposed to , win wars, heal people and uplift the next generation! Now if the same thing is re-presented to you as , “the military general, sensed that opportunity in a fleeting moment and acted with valor”, or that “surgeon acted instinctively and aggressively to stabilize the patient and revive from the brink of death” or “the school teacher- empathized and saw the things as the kids saw them to create that unparalleled learning experience!” Well, basically the same thing, expressed differently! So while the earlier narration lacked the dramatization through the play of words than the later, it communicated the same thing and so did the later approach, albeit with that drama added! This is exactly where courage gets lost in translation, if I have to put it in that way! You see, the act of being courageous is intrinsic and as I said earlier, is more reflective of who we are and what all we can get to that moment to face, sustain, avoid or overcome the challenge that we face, so whether one showers generous words or not- the element of courage and valor doesn’t diminish or change!

In fact, the misconception about the over- rated and over-glorification of courage happens more than anything is because, people who record, document and share it, do so after the event and than thats where their own personalities and figments of imagination start to play mind games- to try and feel what the characters of the story would have experienced- irrespective whether that is real or not and this is why courage gets distorted when it comes to its real essence and rightful representation! Courage is not in the moment- courage leads to the moment and helps one sustain and overcome and move unto the next by acting with intent, purpose and direction!

Real courage is rustic, ageing and non-glamorous- something pretty much what an iron- smith of the yesteryear were! Courage gets forged by the variation in experiences that one gets, the contextual settings, the intrinsic value systems, belief tables, intellect and how one chooses to deploy and use these to ones’ own advantage or to the service of others! Like all other human virtues, courage too, when used to self-serve is always short lived and unless there is enough goodness for the many around, the highs experienced will fade away much rapidly than they come in! Unlike other virtues the one place where courage differs, is that it depends a lot more on the contextual settings and the wisdom and alignment of the people around! Let me quickly explain this bit too!

You may be a wise person, living ahead of your times, say a scientist or perhaps an innovator and who has been able to come up with something unique to offer to the world around you- but if that world around you is pathetically dumb (sounds familiar!), ignorant or indifferent, guess what is going to unfold? All of that you have come up with is going to be wasted! Not because you were the problem, but the contextual settings around you were! You may want to ask- where’s courage in all this? Well courage is very much at the centre of all this!

You see, even for that individual scientists/ innovator to come up with something knowing that the society around may or may not lap it up – would have been a very bold and courageous step to take to begin with! So this is where, courage gets wasted away- knowing that you are courageous or have the ability to deploy bold and courageous actions is one thing, but doing it when the contextual settings are aligned is more important! This is what makes courage- so much intrinsic and extrinsic at the same time! Like a Leader without followers and Followers with no one to Lead- Courage applied at the wrong time or for the wrong reason- just fades away and is the essence of all the great failures of humanity which just missed being the headlines- either because they were ahead of their times, in the wrong contextual settings or simply because they were meant to be going that way!

Like other virtues another interesting space around courage is the factor of proportionality! Everyone likes to see the good crush the bad, everyone likes the right to win over the not-so-right, but now if you alter that question, how much force and how much of crush will you want to allow to prove your point of right being over the wrong- you will get a wide range of responses- ranging from total annihilation to the extreme other end of forgive- forget and join together type of a reaction! So what does this say? How much courage is enough- can courage be detrimental and can it backfire too?

The falsified stories around courage to be brutal, fierce, fast and rapid have just gone on to make more and more people fall prey to that fallacy and the results have been erroneous, disastrous and far from what they could have been, we all know about when nations attacked the other, thinking something was amiss, or because someone said, something was going to be amiss and in all that melee, nations attacked with brutal and unrelenting force and till this day global peace remains elusive as ever before only form one simple factor- misplaced courage and overzealous deployment of a generous amount of it for no real reason! You see, you don’t burn your house down if there’s a cockroach that get’s into it! You deploy and enact that much courage, as is needed to manage the cockroach, not wreak havoc and burn down your whole house and threaten your neighbors too! Calibrated courage is the only thing that differentiates someone who is on a progressive path from one who is either destroying that path or embarking on a detour by creating altogether new consequences as a result of excessive or less than adequate deployment of courage!

So my final words, courage is all about steadfastness, being steadfast in the moment to bring in all the resources that you can harness to meet, sustain, avoid or overcome a challenge using the right amount of it and at the right time and needless to say for a purpose that is aimed to serve the many at all the times! This is when courage shines and fables are built and legacies get created! Anything apart form this, if you ask me, is just a passing flash of lightening which will be soon forgotten as the wild fires subside and new forests grow in areas which have been lead bare by the unwanted and unwarranted use and deployment of courage!

I leave you here with these thoughts, urging you to sharpen your courage so that, as you arrive at that moment of yours when you need to deploy it, you are able to create a story which inspires not in the future, but even as it gets played out in the today and leaves no room for falsified representations or larger than life contexts getting woven into it!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another one! Stay wise and stay courageous!