Quiet Courage

Most courage happens when no one is watching. It’s those quiet moments with yourself making the everyday decisions that affect your day-to-day life. The quiet moments with your own thoughts and feelings, sitting with your own pain or your own happiness. The quiet moments of deciding the heaving things of who you are how you’re going to live your life.

Courage has often been looked at as a visible character trait. Anyone reading a book or watching a movie can see the visible actions the hero took to save the day while surmounting unspeakable odds. What’s often not shown or discuss is the quiet moments where the hero decided how they wanted to live the day and how the day was going to go. The quiet moments of searching their own thoughts and feelings for the strength to choose who they wanted to be and how they were going to live their life that day in order to succeed. While the visible actions of the hero show courage, these quiet moments are also courage.

Courage can also be the willingness to look into one’s self and make those hard decisions about what really matters to you, what’s important to you. Not what’s important for your partner, your kid, a parent, but what’s important to you and who you want to be as a person.

Becoming who you want to be as you live your life is courageous. Life is always changing. You age. You marry. You (maybe) divorce. You (maybe) have children. You move from one house to another, one town to another, one state to another. You challenge the belief systems you grew up just accepting, like spirituality or societal norms. Because life is always changing, it is important to look into yourself and make sure you are still the best version of you for the life you are living.

Anything can be looked at with new perspective, and, in my opinion, one should always have the courage to challenge yourself, and doing this is a quiet courage that no one sees… and will help you write your stories.

Write on, my writer friends!