Fearlessness and Courage
The Northern Traditions are filled with tales of brave adventurers sailing forth for raid and trade, while the stalwart homesteaders courageously defend the land for the return of the adventurers. Everyone is stout, hearty, bold, and brave!
Um, yeah.
It does take a particular strength of character to say “sure, I’m going to leave everyone and everything I know, and get into this boat, and sail across the sea, let’s see what happens!”
It also takes a particular strength of character to defend your home and loved ones from attack—whether it’s a storm that shakes the house, or invaders coming to plunder and kidnap.
If you are reading this post, you probably don’t face these exact challenges on a day-to-day basis.
But you do face situations that require personal strength and some amount of courage to deal with. Sometimes it’s a major event, and sometimes it’s the daily grind of keeping yourself and your loved ones sheltered, fed, and in one piece.
When I was young (and by that I mean, like, until I was about 35 years old), I was more or less fearless. I didn’t worry that things would go wrong, or what I would do if something didn’t work out. I had complete confidence in my ability to land on my feet, no matter what happened.
Being fearless made it easy to live life as an adventure, making changes at will (not just little things, like hair color, but quitting my job without any savings, and without another job lined up, and going traveling with no obvious means of support and no real plan for what I would do when I returned), and not worrying about what would happen, because I knew it would all work out.
Then I had a some real-life problems that didn’t work out quite so easily, and I learned to worry. I began creating scenarios of “what would I do if X happened?”, where X was something negative and beyond my control (losing my job, losing my home, losing my significant other).
I learned to be brave. To muster the courage to look at the thing I feared, and then do what I needed to do in spite of the fear. To say, “well, X might happen, and if it does, I will do Z”. To feel the fear and do it anyway.
That the advice to “feel the fear and do it anyway” is almost a cliche makes it no less useful. We do things because of, or in spite of, our reasons. I do it because I want to, and I do it in spite of my fear.
I miss being fearless. I miss stepping off the cliff with total faith that I would fly, that feeling of the right things happening at the right time being all positive things.
But I have learned the depths of my own courage, and that brings great satisfaction as well.
