Bravery is a muscle we can’t exercise without fear
Hi all! I’ve got even more new people here! Welcome! In case you’re wondering what this Substack is all about and who the heck I am, here’s a little intro I did recently.
Like many of us, I’ve been thinking a lot about fear these days. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about what it can teach me, and what it can teach my kids.
I’m an elder millennial, and there are a lot of us (at least, in my social sphere) who employ a parenting style that I would say is some combination of gentle parenting and helicopter parenting (let’s call it “gentle-copter” parenting). It’s a style that is probably more responsive to kids’ emotional needs than older generations. Gentle-copter parents generally treat kids like full people and have real conversations with them. They talk about feelings. They also help them (and sometimes indulge them)… a lot. Arguably too much.
No parent likes to see their kid struggle, of course, but it’s important to remember that struggle can be a good thing. That discomfort, and even fear, are sometimes okay. Being gentle and protective are good things. But too gentle, and certainly too protective, maybe not so much.
Some of you know, husband is a fourth grade teacher. Between that, and just being around lots of other parents, we have a special window into parenting styles and child behavior, one that spans the more than 15 years he’s been teaching. So we see trends. And one of them is more and more kids afraid to take risks and do things without hand-holding, or who just lack the ability to tolerate discomfort. I even saw some of this among the students I taught at the college level. I suspect these kids simply aren’t practiced in fear and discomfort, and aren’t confident in their ability to handle it. This is a problem.
Because you can’t have courage without fear. You can’t be brave without being afraid.
And damned if we don’t need enormous amounts of courage right now. We need it from kids, from parents, from everyone. Courage and bravery are like muscles; they need to be exercised to get stronger. We can teach our kids how to move through fear, and we can continuously practice those skills ourselves. But that means we have to welcome in a bit of fear and discomfort.
I’m not talking about anything traumatic. But our lives (at least here in the U.S.) are so cushioned by comfort, convenience, and dependency on technologies designed to make even the most basic experiences frictionless, that we’re becoming less and less practiced in handling difficult things. Couple that with the changes many of us have experienced since Covid (working from home, still feeling rusty on our social skills, etc.), and we have fewer opportunities to face fears, big and small, that keep us strong. But we can’t afford to let our courage muscles atrophy. Not ever, but especially not in this political and social moment.
And I know, much as I want to protect my kids from pain, fear, and struggle, that I’m doing them a disservice if I don’t give them the gift of developing their courage and confidence in hard situations.
So I suppose this is a rallying cry for all of us to lean into discomfort and fear, and to exercise our bravery muscles a bit. Let’s push ourselves to get involved in something to challenge this administration (even better if it’s not simply a polite, proper, permitted protest). Look for ways to protect and support the most vulnerable and targeted folks. Find the courage to speak your objections to cruelty, lies, oppression, and genocide out loud. Reach out your hand, even if it’s uncomfortable, and bring someone with you.
And I want to especially appeal to the courage of White and affluent folks right now, because we’re the least vulnerable at a time of great peril for many of our neighbors. We need desperately to find our backbone, not to fantasize about fleeing the fight, or fret about speaking out, or clutch our pearls when we think people are fighting for their lives in the “wrong way.” (Boy can we be a nation of pearl-clutchers.)
Folks in the U.S. have been raised in a culture of individualism and competition, so community doesn’t come naturally. We’re scared of the conflict and messiness of being in relationship with people. We’re even more afraid of trying to actually do something and build something with people, especially when it’s new. We’re afraid of making mistakes. We’re afraid of failing. We’re afraid of imagining a better world where everyone has what they need and the planet is cared for, because society and business guys and internet trolls tell us these dreams are naive and impossible. All of these are understandable fears, and ones we’ve been programmed to feel by a society that wants us isolated and compliant.
And yet, we act and we build and we imagine anyway, because we’re brave, and that’s how we get to be braver.
There’s a part of me, I’ll admit, that is drawn to the idea of “toughness.” Not because being tough is cool, but because it’s a kind of protective armor; the tougher you are, the harder you are to hurt. I’m not saying this is something worth aspiring to. It’s just a seductive idea because it feels a lot safer than being vulnerable, and sometimes I mistakenly equate it with courage.
But what I’m really striving for is what Roshi Joan Halifax describes as “strong back, soft front.” She says:
“All too often, our so-called strength comes from fear, not love; instead of having a strong back, many of us have a defended front shielding a weak spine. In other words, we walk around brittle and defensive, trying to conceal our lack of confidence. If we strengthen our backs, metaphorically speaking, and develop a spine that’s flexible, but sturdy, then we can risk having a front that’s soft and open, representing choiceless compassion. The place in your body where these two meet—strong back and soft front—is the brave, tender ground in which to root our caring deeply.”
I want to be - and I want my kids to be - passionately and courageously earnest about making the world a better place for everyone, and healing a planet that we haven’t treated very well. Caring deeply about the world is hard and requires hard choices. The only way to develop that flexible but sturdy spine Halifax talks about is by doing hard, and yes, sometimes uncomfortable or scary things. And doing them from a place of love.
It’s impossible to do anything that’s new and hard perfectly. We will stumble. We will fail sometimes. We can’t live without flaws and failures, big and small, within cruel systems that make it damn near impossible not to participate in their cruelty. Critics and cowards will see us stumble and say “See, you’re doing it imperfectly. You’re bad. You’re wrong. It can’t be done. Give up.”
But we’re brave, so we move through the discomfort of being told we’re flawed, and knowing we’re flawed, and we try anyway to do a little good in the world. So let’s embrace our fears. And let’s let our kids face theirs, too. Because it’s only through fear that we find courage.
And it’s our courage that will carry us forward through whatever horrors this sometimes ugly world throws us, toward a horizon of love and liberation.
p.s. Speaking of coming together with people and doing new things, a little group of us in our community created our very first ever zine! It’s about community and individual preparedness and we handed it out at a community event over the weekend. And people actually loved it! It sparked some great conversations and taught us that more people are thinking about these things than we ever would’ve expected.
I’m so proud of our little crew who pulled off this collaborative effort. Many of us don’t even know each other super well yet, but came together anyway to try something new because we thought it might fulfill a need in the community. And people were happy to recieve our offering. Huzzah!
Elizabeth, I loved this post, as a parent, as an activist, and as a fraidy cat. Meeting our fears and doing it anyway is indeed a muscle and one we collectively need to develop if we are to remain a democracy (it is also imperative as individuals if we want to set clear boundaries in the world). Teaching our children this is incredibly challenging and such a delicate process, one I continue developing as my son just turned 15. Also, congrats on the 'zine! I'm not in the Chicago area and wondering if there's a place I could purchase a copy? Cheers!
I appreciate so much what you are expressing and bringing forward Elizabeth. You are supporting me in continuing to grow a 'strong back, soft front' as I engage in my work as an embodied elder. I have shared your writing with some of my friends and colleagues. Keep going.