Existential Courage
The other day I stumbled across an ad for a workshop helping you to release your intuition. It used the standard approach to selling these sort of New Age ideas: quotes from Einstein and Steve Jobs on the importance of intuition, vague promises of revealing secrets known only to the most successful and powerful, and an invitation to “let your life be easier.”
It reminded me of a quote from Barbara Ehrenreich in Bright-sided, her critique of the positive thinking craze. She says “positive thinking is not the same as existential courage.” This might be the most important distinction we can make these days. We are constantly bombarded with messages from advertisers trying to sell us on the idea that our lives should be comfortable and easy. Eventually, we start to believe them. We start to see hard work as a sign of failure and discomfort as a psychological illness. Even our understanding of spirituality is being corrupted by misconceptions of enlightenment as some sort of personal accomplishment marked by perpetual bliss.
As a result, we have become unbalanced, individually and as a society. Sure, comfort and ease play a role in a life well-lived: we need hedonic pleasure and moments of pure enjoyment. But focusing almost exclusively on this kind of comfort addiction leaves us with a sort of existential hangover and a void that’s impossible to fill - a void that advertisers promise to fill with anything they can sell you.
Existential courage is absolutely necessary if we are ever to find a way out of this addictive cycle. The roots of the word courage actually come from the French coeur, or heart. It was believed that acts of valor and bravery could only be inspired by connecting to something larger than oneself. And there’s the rub, because that connection, rather than comforting, often confronts. It highlights our fragility. It points out how small and insignificant we are. That thing we connect to calls into question the ego-self and creates what Pema Chodron calls the vulnerable heart. It forces us to confront our own demons and ask if “I prefer to grow up and relate to life directly, or do I choose to live and die in fear? ”
Existential courage is about connecting to life with a profound love and compassion that moves beyond Hallmark greeting cards and hollow Hollywood formula movies. It sees that oneness with the whole of creation also means oneness with the suffering and the shadow. It’s a love that sees everything with open eyes – the beauty and the self-imposed pain, the brilliant sparks and the enduring insanity of the beloved. It stands on the edge of mortality, never forgetting our fragility, but chooses to act in the here and now.
And it is this paradox that is at the core of existential courage – letting our vulnerability make us strong, letting our incompleteness make us whole, letting the impossibility of the task inspire action. It knows, as Gandhi said, that “what you can do is insignificant yet it is vitally important that you do it.” Acts of existential courage are rarely grandiose - that’s the ego’s idea of courage. Usually, they are small, humble things – things that require practically no real effort beyond the courage to actually do them.
So what is that one crazy little thing that you can do today? What makes you a little uncomfortable and threatens your belief that you’re in control? What is that awesome thing you can connect with that makes you aware of how small and incomplete you are? What is that one thing that probably won’t make a difference anyhow but feels vitally important?
