courage means putting your heart into it

The poet David Whyte’s Consolations is a lovely set of meditations on words, one of which is “courage”. We often reserve the word for acts involving risking one’s life, but the word’s etymology (from the french coeur meaning “heart”) means something like “heartful”. So, it can be applied just as usefully to putting your heart into something that needs you when you’d otherwise be too tired, too guarded, or otherwise hesitant to do so. In Whyte’s words:

Courage is the measure of your heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.

As a parent, I have found myself called to courage more than I expected, though not by running into the street to save a child from oncoming traffic as the traditional definition of courage might hold. More commonly, it looks like this: after a long day at work and laboring to prepare one of my daughter’s favorite dinners (which she then refuses to eat), and after a drawn-out negotiation with her over the necessity of bathing and brushing one’s teeth, my daughter will ask me to tell her a story before bed. I sometimes choose to read a familiar one from a book, or to tell her a short, simple one. But on the occasions when I can summon the courage to put my heart into it, I will tell her a brand new story about someone like her doing the things she dreams to do.

I wonder if, like exercising a muscle, straining our figurative hearts to exhaustion and then finding a bit more strength, we can make them stronger for the next time.

Jen

Alan Watts writes in Tao: The Watercourse Way about jen, which he translates as “human-heartedness” and sounds a lot like David Whyte’s understanding of courage:

At the head of all virtues Confucius put not righteousness (i), but human-heartedness (jen), which is not so much benevolence, as often translated, but being fully and honestly human.