“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.”
— Nelson Mandela, Nobel laureate
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Breathes there a man with a soul so dead who has never said to himself, “I feared no one. There is nothing in this world I fear.”
If you encounter such a man, then he’s a damned liar. There is no such person. Whether you’re male or female, handsome or beautiful, ugly or despised, young or old, we are afraid of something.
There are those who are afraid of heights and public speaking. There are those who are frightened upon seeing a spider or a snake. And there are those who don’t feel at ease when they are alone in an elevator or walking in the dark.
“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light,” Plato said. In The Wise Man’s Fear, author Patrick Rothfuss wrote: “There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.”
“Fear is the mind-killer,” Frank Herbert said in Dune. Norman Vincent Peale, American motivational leader, thinks so, too. “Fear began in the first place as a trickle of thought across your mind, perhaps in childhood, in fact most probably in your early formative years,” he wrote.
“Continuing to develop, it finally cuts a deep channel of thought in your mind,” Peale continued. “So dominating did it become that every thought you have about yourself, your health, your future, your family, was drained into this deep channel of fear and came up tinged with anxiety.”
The reason why we have fear in life is because we are afraid to die. I was reminded of a story that happened to Nikita Krushchev. He was the Soviet statesman who led the Soviet Union during the part of the Cold War. He became the first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and was chairman of the Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964.
When Krushchev pronounced his famous denunciation of the Stalin era, someone in the Congress Hall was reported to have said, “Where were you, Comrade Krushchev, when all these innocent people were being slaughtered?”
Krushchev stopped, looked around the hall, and said, “Will the man who said that kindly stand up?” Tension mounted in the hall. No one stood up. Then Krushchev said, “Well, you have your answer now, whoever you are. I was in exactly the same position then as you are now.”
The man who asked the question didn’t stand up because he was afraid something bad might happen to him. “Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration,” Herbert said.
The exact opposite of fear is courage. “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it,” Nobel Peace laureate Nelson Mandela said. “The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”
There are two kinds of courage, William Barclay pointed out. “There is the courage that is an instinctive reaction, almost a reflex action,” he explained. “It is the courage of a man or woman suddenly hit with a crisis and reacting bravely, without having had a moment to think about it all. Many people can become an immediate hero or heroine in the heat of the moment.
“But then there is another kind of courage, the courage of a person who sees tragedy approaching. It is still faraway and he or she has time to think and time to escape the issue, but clenches the fists and goes on.”
History records how Alexander the Great and his army were dying of thirst after marching eleven days. Suddenly, they came upon some local farmers who were fetching skins full of water from a hidden river. Seeing the famous general choked with thirst, they offered him a helmet filled with water. He asked them to whom they were carrying the water.
“To our children” the farmers answered in chorus. “But your life is more important than theirs. Even if they all perish, we can raise a new generation.”
Then Alexander took the helmet filled with water into his hands and looked around to see all his soldiers eyeing the water and licking their dry lips. He did not have the courage to drink, but gave back the water untouched to the farmers. “If only I would drink,” he told them, “the rest of the soldiers would be out of heart.”
At that, the soldiers rallied around him as never before and defied their fatigue and their thirst.
“Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently,” wrote Maya Angelou, an American poet, singer, memoirist, and civil rights activist.
“There are so many ways to be brave in this world,” Veronica Roth wrote in Allegiant. “Sometimes bravery involves laying down your life for something bigger than yourself, or for someone else. Sometimes it involves giving up everything you have ever known, or everyone you have ever loved, for the sake of something greater.
“But sometimes it doesn’t,” Roth continued. “Sometimes it is nothing more than gritting your teeth through pain, and the work of every day, the slow walk toward a better life. That is the sort of bravery I must have now.”
“Courage doesn’t always roar,” commented American writer and artist Mary Ann Radmacher. “Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I’ll try again tomorrow.”
