Right to the Heart

"It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are."
—e. e. cummings

Beginning Paragraph Everyone praises courage. Confucius considers courage one of the three universally recognized moral qualities. Walt Disney says that courage turns dreams into realities. Muhammad Ali says that nothing in life can be accomplished without courage. Questions But what is courage? How is it different from foolhardiness? Is it the opposite of fear, or is it somehow a kind of negotiation with fear? Where can one find it, and how can one regain it when it is lost? Thesis Statement The word courage goes right to the heart of who we are, what we love, and what we want ourselves and our world to be.

Middle Paragraphs Merriam-Webster defines courage as the "mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty," or, in the words of Ernest Hemingway, "courage is grace under pressure." Danger, fear, difficulty, pressure—these make courage not only necessary but possible. Denotation Courage cannot exist without opposition. One must feel fear before one can courageously persevere in the face of it. As Mark Twain puts it, "Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear." The famous World War II general George S. Patton makes the connection even clearer: "Courage is fear holding on a minute longer." So, courage does not remove fear but rather persists in the face of it.

Topic Sentence How does one master fear? Laozi, the author of the Tao Te Ching, says that courage arises from love: Quotations "Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage." By that definition, courage belongs to mothers even more powerfully than to soldiers. Examples Women who fight for their children are often called mother bears or tiger mothers, named for animals that are especially dangerous when guarding their young. People overcome fear by loving someone or something powerfully enough to risk what needs to be done. So, just as courage cannot exist without fear, it also requires "skin in the game." The courageous person does not fight because there is nothing to lose but because there is everything to lose. And a person gains courage by continually fighting despite opposition. Eleanor Roosevelt says you learn courage through "every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' "

Negative Definition But courage is not foolhardiness. As Patton puts it, "Untutored courage is useless in the face of educated bullets." Courage does not take stupid risks, nor does it ignore the consequences of failure. It takes calculated risks and deals with those consequences. The famous basketball coach John Wooden says, "Success is never final, failure is never fatal. It's courage that counts." How is failure never fatal? Sometimes courageous people die in the attempt to accomplish something. If the person risks all for selfish motives, then the person's death would indeed be a fatal failure. But courageous people fight for others, not for themselves. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was killed in his fight for equality, but he did not fail, and his courage carries the fight forward to this day.

Etymology Courage is rooted in love, and the word itself derives from the locus of love. The Latin root cour means "heart," and the suffix age means "the quality of" or "having." So, courage means "having heart." It relates to our words hearty and heartfelt. We say "take heart" to mean "have courage." We say that someone who has "lost heart" is "discouraged." Courage thus draws connotations from the various definitions we have for heart, including "moral center" and "seat of love" as well as "the core of something" and "the principal part." When we exhibit courage, we act in accordance with our truest self, drawing strength from the center of our being.

Since fear is not the opposite of courage, what is? Cowardice? Author Jim Hightower says no: "The opposite for courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow." Conformity requires no skin in the game, no risk, and no mastery of fear—three necessary ingredients of real courage. The great British prime minister Winston Churchill notes, "Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen." In both cases, courage is not conformity. It is honest engagement with the source of fear. Apathetic disengagement is the opposite of courage. When 42 percent of eligible voters do not vote, they show the opposite of courage. When politicians pass laws to suppress the vote further, they, too, show the opposite of courage. That's dishonest engagement. In the words of another great British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, "Courage is fire, and bullying is smoke." So courage means honorably facing fear.

Ending Paragraph In Shakespeare's Macbeth, Lady Macbeth shouts at her husband, "We fail! But screw your courage to the sticking-place, and we'll not fail!" She has half of the equation correct. Courage is about persisting in the face of fear. But few would call Macbeth's bloody campaign courageous because it is selfishly motivated, dishonorably conducted, foolishly executed, and fatally flawed. He fights furiously, but he has already lost the core of who he is, and no one who has lost his heart can fight with true courage. Macbeth is immoral, cruel, and craven, not courageous. True courage arises from the love of someone or something other than oneself. Courage is mastering fear in order to take intelligent risks to achieve a greater end.