How Can We Be Braver?
It will never get easier than right now to recklessly pursue our passion. What are the chances we’re willing to let go of who we are to become what we might be in the later ages of our lives? Honestly? Little to none. When we’re young(er), we celebrate our childlike mind. We are playful. We are open-minded. We are unrestrained by the inner voice of reason, collective cynicism or fear of failure. We start dreaming, and these dreams are the very blueprint to the reality we so badly crave for. There is no better time than now to dare to lose our footing momentarily. Because not to dare is to lose ourselves.
Life looks like a promising daring adventure, till one day it becomes something else. It becomes regret.
It may not happen now. It may not happen anytime soon. But one day, we’ll peer at the same night sky. We’ll see the universe and we start to feel small. We’ll wonder about all that mystery and where has it gone to. Perhaps the answer points at how we’re constantly in a hurry to get validated, but never in a hurry to learn more about ourselves.
On that very day, our everburning passion will whisper in our ears, “Where have you been?”
When these words, in many other shape and form, come to us in a flash of awareness and insight, we’ll come to understand our own smallness and insignificance, which at first comes as an unwelcome disillusionment, but eventually becomes a kind of comfort. Maybe when we learn, in one way or another, to live with the inevitability of our individual deaths that is when we truly understand what it means to live in a space of bravery. Be brave, not only for our professional lives, but for other important aspects including being creative, familial and friendlier.
When I say “be brave”, it is not only an admonishment for those who are reading this, but for myself too.
When we are brave and are willing to give of ourselves regardless of result, we are pushing ourselves towards the goals through paralyzing crisis of confidence. We’re either in, or we’re in the way of ourselves. Being brave has less to do with a contrarian mindset with the tendency to zig when others zag, but more to do with giving ourselves permission and room to wake up to the firm conviction that we’re nowhere near our full potential.
Being brave is believing in the razor-thin chance that there is a shred of truth in us tapping in a better version of ourselves.
But the unfortunate truth is that the advice of telling someone to be brave will fall short like how we try to explain what a rainbow is to a blind person. When we read a sample of college commencement address, we’ll quickly discover that each success story has their own unique defeats. For every entrepreneur and artist who was brave enough in resolutely working on a singular idea for an extremely long time, there is another who pivoted wildly. For every successful individual who was committed to routinal frameworks and stringent metrics, there is another who was deliberately spontaneous. What lies between our searing idealism and our own guttering disillusion? Me and myself.
