The Yin and Yang of Courage

The father of an Indian friend of mine loved to go hunting at night in the deep black of the jungle. When he’d shot an animal big enough to weigh down the jeep, he would leave his five-year-old son at the side of the track to guard the bloody carcass. This was over four decades ago, so there were still a lot of tigers in those forests.

My friend laughs when he tells the story:

“They’d leave a lantern with me. I taught myself never to move the lantern around or look up into the trees, because there I would see all sorts of shapes, things moving around. So I would just look down, like this.” He crosses his arms over his chest, hunches his shoulders and stares fixedly at the ground, eyes wide and brows squeezed together.

This friend is now 46 years old and credits those hunting trips with his father for leaving him with very little else to fear in life. Still, he told me on the phone this morning about a woman.

“I fell in love, so much that it surprised me,” he said. “Then I started to think about all the things that could go wrong, all the ways I might lose her. And I panicked – just pure, screaming, nail-biting panic. But I never panic. I don’t think I even really knew I was panicking. I just looked for a way to distract myself from the fear.”

This is a man who can’t remember the last time he’s felt scared – a man who, when he hears Maoists have taken over in Nepal, hops into the car to drive across the border and check it out.

Then he meets a woman who makes him feel open and raw and vulnerable and hopeful. And he panics.

I feel a lot of companionship with my friend today, because I wrote in this blog for the first time a week ago, clicked on “post,” and promptly freaked out.

You see, I love to write but my fear of showing up on the page has had me skirting around “really writing” for years, always having jobs where I did a lot of writing but rarely sharing anything of my own.

On days 1 and 2 of this challenge – in committing to writing this blog and starting it – I noticed that I was feeling a lot of fear. But it wasn’t just the expansive, “Wow, I just did something a little scary” feeling that I’d expected. I sifted through the fridge for a snack without finding anything I wanted to eat, considered distracting myself with a movie marathon… basically did my own version of my friend’s reaction when he fell in love and panicked.

Finally I went for a hike with a wise friend. As my boots rose and fell on the pine-needle-speckled trail, the smell of damp earth rising to my nose, the swish of our arms in our windbreakers finding their rhythm as we moved, I was able to get at what was really bothering me.

It turned out that my fear had something important to teach me, beyond the expected fear of starting the blog itself:

I’d originally posted that I would blog about this challenge every day of the year. But, as I finally realized, when I went for a walk and talked to a friend and paid attention, the point of this year-long adventure is to do one thing a day that scares me and see how that expands my life. I don’t want my writing on it to be a daily reporting of what I did the day before. I want to actually learn something, about fear and how it works in us, and about how we can expand our lives by facing it head-on. And I want to write about that learning.

(And I might add that I want to do all of that, without developing some sort of addiction to distract myself from the fear!).

Listening to my fear led me to make a couple of changes: first, I decided to still DO one thing that scares me each day, but to blog about it once a week so there’s time to actually learn something along the way. Second, I decided to ask for support for when things get scary again in the future. Another wise advisor had said, when I told her about the idea, that I’d probably want to have a “seatbelt” on this ride. On Day 3 of the challenge, I asked several people, including a few that I don’t know that well and who I thought might say “no,” to be a part of my “seatbelts” – people I can call when I need support.

So that’s what happened when I put on my hiking boots, slowed down, and paid attention.

This got me thinking: not just about how much we can learn from our fear, but also about how we see courage as this big, expansive thing that has us charging out to take on the world.

But what about the other side of courage, the quiet courage that has us, for example, ask for help when we need it; go for a hike in the woods; or just pay attention, sink into our fear and learn what it has to tell us?

I’m thinking of this, today, as the “Yin and Yang of Courage.” The yang, which has us looking outward, doing things that seem expansive – like, say, committing to doing one thing that scares me, every day this year. And the yin, which has us slowing down, paying attention, doing things that may seem quieter but are often just as courageous.

Like, for example, opening ourselves to love.