Nature has begun to lower her thermostat, at least in my part of the world, as today we all (or at least most of us) take a day off from working.
It has the feel of a turning point. Maybe a new beginning is just around the corner?
Certainly, it is for some.
College campuses swell once more with students as the leaves begin to contemplate their journey from bough to earth.
The returning students are happy to be turning once more to their studies or at least to the freedom of life in the dorm, and newcomers are both eager and nervous to be embarking on a new path.
There is always a new path, a beckoning to a new beginning, a chance to change what needs to be changed.
It only requires courage to embark on it.
I say “only”, but I know full well that courage is not something that comes easily.
Webster’s defines “courage” as the “strength of mind to carry on in spite of danger or difficulty”.
I might just add that the danger or difficulty sometimes comes right from that very same mind in the form of fear of the unknown.
I imagine that courage has been hard-won since long before the root word “corage” from Old French (circa 1300) made its way into the tongues of men. “Corage” meaning “heart, innermost feelings; temper” taking its cue from the Latin root “cor” meaning “heart”.
Robert Frost said that “the saddest thing in life is that the best thing in it should be courage”.
Oh, but Mr. Frost, I must respectfully disagree. Because courage, mined from the heart where it finds its roots, can change the macrocosm of a society or the microcosm of a life.
But it can be hard-won.
There is nothing light or breezy about moving through your fears into a new life.
It’s not a checklist of simple tasks that we can knock off in an afternoon and simply be done with it. Courage is not ridding ourselves of fear, but moving forward in spite of our fear.
We don’t find courage once-for-all, drop it in a drawer that we can pull out and use time and again.
Like manna that sustained the Israelites for a day but couldn’t be preserved and stored for tomorrow, courage must be dug daily and the digging takes work.
Sometimes it takes all we have. Or think we have.
And yeah, we can listen to people who encourage us, read about people who’ve done what we want to do, get inspired by all the stories and the motivation just might rub off on us a bit.
But ultimately and finally, courage can only come from where its roots live. From the heart.
Our heart.
My heart, your heart.
The space that knows who you really are, who you are really meant to be.
The one place where we will find it.
~xo,
LuAnne
