Fear and courage

You’ve probably heard the advice to do something that scares you at least once in your life. (Or maybe more often? I guess that depends on who you talk to.)

But what does it actually mean to be scared of something? I’ve been thinking about that lately.
Is it something that challenges an idea you’ve held onto? Something that puts your life at risk? Or is it that thing that makes your stomach go all butterfly-like and your brain start asking, “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

Some of you may know that this past weekend I participated in a community project that involved hanging out with some professional dancers, learning choreography, and then performing it twice — once at ArtYard and once at the Guggenheim.

Sound scary?

For someone (me) who has never danced on stage before, it might have been.

But honestly, I was more nervous about driving my husband to the airport on Saturday night with the possibility of a bad storm than I was about the performances.

For me, the performances weren’t brave things, they were fun things.

But I know that for some people, getting up on a stage and dancing in front of a crowd would be terrifying.

Having people comment on how brave I was to do it made me think about how often I dismiss other people’s fears.

I believe we all do this to some degree. We evaluate what other people should or shouldn’t be afraid of through the window of our own perception.

And while that may be completely natural, I think it can lessen our compassion and empathy for the people around us — the people we love, and even the people we simply have to tolerate from time to time. (Your boss or your mother-in-law, for example.)

You may remember the quote from Frog and Toad about courage being doing something that we are afraid of.

But here’s the thing: Some of the things you do without giving them a second thought might be genuinely frightening to your best friend in the whole world. And something they do quite easily may be terrifying for you.

So we can’t just look at the action and know if a person is going to struggle or have the time of their life doing it.

Why even think about this?

If I don’t know that someone is nervous about doing something, I may not think to offer support or encouragement — or recognize them for doing something that actually took courage. And that feels like a missed opportunity: a chance to show up for our friends, our neighbors, and the people around us in a way they might really need. If we always look at actions through our own filters, we are going to be misled most of the time.

How do we know? That gets tricky. Many of us are very good at keeping our fears tightly held and secreted away. We don’t necessarily tell people when we are scared. And so it may be difficult to reach out for support, or show in some way that we need it.

I don’t really have a good suggestion for this, but maybe we can ask our friends things like:
“How did that go?” instead of saying, “Boy, that was a piece of cake, right?”

We might discover, by asking or observing, that something we thought was easy was actually a really big deal for someone else. 

But because people may not reveal their hand, perhaps the best route is patience.

Be patient with yourself when you encounter the things that scare you, even if you are the only person in the room who feels that way.

Be patient with the people around you. If they are delaying, forgetting, getting it wrong, or just not getting started, maybe they are simply scared of some aspect of the task ahead. Maybe there is something happening inside them that you can’t see.

One thing we know for sure: one day it will be us who is facing something challenging, and we might feel like we are the only ones in the world who are having a hard time. Someone acknowledging that in some way may be just the energy you need to be able to go forth and conquer.
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Or, at least, get started.