Stepping Forward

“Courage doesn’t always roar….Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says…I’ll try again tomorrow.”

My Aunty lost her son to suicide last week.  Our family is greatly saddened by this tragic loss and from losing a beautiful young man too early in life.  The agony for my Aunty is to wake up each day and face the truth and that takes incredible courage.

“For the rest of the day the grief consumed me, the emptiness opening into a deep crevasse, ice walls on each side spreading into my heart.”

Grief, loss, disease, divorce, depression, they come into our life uninvited and yet sometimes we must wake up to face them.   We must find the deep strength and courage that lies within us all, as grief can destroy us or focus us.

“Humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die. … If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.” – Eckhart Tolle

Pain makes us aware of this moment.  To cope with our pain, we must live one day at a time as living in the past or in the future is not an option.  Your hope is knowing that others have walked through this and have survived, so never think you are alone.

“The power is in you. The answer is in you. And you are the answer to all your searches: you are the goal. You are the answer. It’s never outside.” – Eckhart Tolle

In our day-to-day lives, the virtue of courage doesn’t receive much attention. Courage is a quality reserved for soldiers, firefighters, and activists but when you see a Mother wake up to the agony of never seeing one of her children again or a cancer victim who has been told they only have two weeks to live….that is courage.

The word courage derives from the Latin cor, which means “heart.” But true courage is more a matter of intellect than of feeling.   In our pain it is a “choice” to live with courage each day.

“Courageous people are still afraid, but they don’t let fear paralyse them”.

Trust that no matter what pain you are given,  physical or emotional, that you will find the courage to walk along this journey.  Walking in courage, you will become aware to the truth of who you are and who you can become.  It is the gift that death and pain give us.

The highest courage is to dare to appear to be what one is. – John Lancaster Spalding