A piece of courage

You may be familiar with a description of courage that says:

Courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s feeling the fear and doing it anyway.

There was a very specific time in my life, an entire lifetime ago, where this got me through each day. Sometimes each moment of each day. I will be forever grateful for that.

Yet now, I do not want to ask for courage. Because I feel in this current space of Me that what I’d be unwittingly asking for is more fear — so that I could then face it by doing the things anyway.

But I’m “doing the things anyway,” anyway.

I would really like Not Fear. I want to focus on the Not-Fear, rather than on overcoming it.

I want peace. I want to move through with peace.

Not to conquer or overcome, but to embrace. To walk side by side together with.

The light, the dark, no difference.

Where do courage and peace meet? What if courage doesn’t have to mean fearful? What if showing up, even in peace, is courageous? What if courage can also be gentle and quiet, unassuming? Not focused on fear, but on the peaceful state of being? Within the situation. Within the moment. As a lifestyle.

What if in facing and embracing fear, rather than facing and conquering or overcoming it — my choice for peace in my heart — is courageous?

I decided that I have everything I need,
and even my anxiety is a messenger.

Carrie-Anne moss