A Year-long Experiment in Living with Courage

“Do one thing every day that scares you.” For years I’ve wondered how my life might change if I followed that famous advice from Eleanor Roosevelt. What would I learn, and how might my outlook shift, if I did one thing each day that took real courage?

Yesterday I committed to it: Every day of 2011, I will do one thing that scares me.

Fear is a funny thing. When people ask me about the past five years of my life – working in places like Pakistan and Haiti and on the border between Darfur and Eastern Chad – I sometimes lose myself in the story. I forget to censor myself and I say things like:

“That night we went to sleep in our mud-walled compound knowing that sometime before morning the rebel army would cross through the city,” or “I was lucky I was evacuated from the country, because a few weeks later a close friend of mine was shot in the car that we had always driven together.”

When I say these things, some people go pale and don’t know what to say, quickly forgetting that moments before they’d said, “Wow! That’s my dream job!” Other people murmur something about how brave they imagine I am, to have done that work.

But here’s where the “fear is funny” part comes in: Sure, I’ve been in some scary situations. But have I ever, for example, asked a man out?

No. Believe it or not, in nearly 4 decades of life I haven’t managed to take that small step (yeah, I know… I know!). And while I won’t say that that particular fear is higher on my list than, say, death, I do wonder:

How do even small, everyday fears shape my life? And how might my life change if I walked toward them, rather than away?

My theory is that even the most “fearless” amongst us often live limited lives, fenced in by fears large and small. We shrink ourselves to fit lives that are much smaller than those that we could have, by stepping away from the fears that arise every day – rather than turning to meet them and learning what they have to teach us.

Living without fear is not my aim. Instead, I want to practice facing my fears, large or small, with courage. The word “courage” comes from the French “coeur,” meaning “heart.” To live in courage means to live from your heart.

So this is it: 2011 is my year to see what will happen if I step into a fear every day, arms wide open. This is my year to see how my life may change if I live from my heart.

The rules are simple:

1) Do one thing every day that scares me, that requires me to live in courage.

2) Write each week about what I've learned.


I leave you with a piece of inspiration that a friend happened to send me a few days ago, while I was trying to decide whether to take on this challenge:


I Will Not Die an Unlived Life
by Dawna Markova


I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible;
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance,
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom,
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.