The Next Big Step

...celebrating courage

Photo Cliff Scholz

I was caught behind a school bus making frequent stops on our road one afternoon recently. I saw the waiting parents, and then little children disembarking. It’s such a big step from the bus to the ground for the little ones. And I can only imagine it’s a big step getting on the bus in the morning. Unless we put ourselves in their place, it’s pretty easy to just see them as cute, and forget what a big step that really is for them, big in so many ways.

Do we see their courage, though? Can we remember how it felt to take that big step onto the bus in the morning and then encounter whatever follows? Taking such a step is a stretch, in every sense of the word.

Seems to me people are a lot braver than we give ourselves credit for.

“It’s no big deal! Just get on the bus!”

Any step can look a lot bigger to the one taking it.

Little kids are brave. Teenagers are brave. Twenty-somethings are brave. Eighty-somethings… doesn’t matter the age, there’s always a new big step, a new challenge associated with it. These challenges demand new kinds of courage. We may laugh about it later, things like our nervousness merging onto an expressway in driver’s ed, or saying hi to the person we like in math class. The awkward first kiss. First day on the job. Likewise, the broken arm, first layoff, first rejection, the loss of a loved one, the unexpected diagnosis. But really, we’re brave. We keep finding our courage in those moments.

I think that’s worth celebrating. Watching people courageously meet the challenges of life as best as they can helps me appreciate them more. Courage is beautiful, poignant, deep. And part of the beauty is, we don’t all have to be brave about the same things. You probably do things I’m scared of. I probably do things you’re scared of.

And good news is, our courage can be contagious. After we’ve taken some big steps and gotten comfortable doing things or being new ways, that can sometimes make it easier for others to do the same. I’m pretty comfortable as a writer, for example. Sometimes writing still scares me — I’m by no means done growing in writing as both art and discipline — but most of the time, I can deal with it, even the places that do get a little scary sometimes. As a teacher, I’d complete my own assignments and occasionally share what I’d written with my classes.

In my twelve years of schooling, I don’t think I ever had a teacher do that. But at least my students knew I wasn’t asking them to do something I didn’t have any skills in. Maybe more important, they could see I thought the assignment was worth doing myself. Writing can be hard at times, but it gets a lot easier when we’re not overly tense and inhibited. I modeled — and still try to model — the playful approach I find helpful as I approach this discipline. I know how daunting those steps can sometimes be, and that’s why it absolutely has to be okay to stumble sometimes. Funny how it changes the atmosphere to see a teacher vulnerably share, cross off words and find something better.

Again, courage can be contagious. And the second big point is, we can also grow in our appreciation of other people’s courage. I think this can help it spread. But sometimes, like all kinds of growing, growing in our appreciation may take a little time.

One of my very first teaching roles was designing and delivering curriculum for a physics-themed summer day camp for elementary-age children. At one of our camps, there was a very little girl there, tiny even for her age of about six or seven. She had a wheelchair handy but mostly got around on crutches. When her dad came to pick her up one afternoon he shared about his daughter, who had lost a leg. I forget what he told me exactly but it was a medical issue, not an accident. And the girl was quite open about it all. She could barely pronounce the word “prosthesis,” and here she had one.

Nonetheless, she was bright and positive. During a pause in my conversation with her dad, he turned to look at her— she was cute as a button — and I could see he was marveling at her. I was about twenty-five back then. So in a limited kind of way, I could begin to sense the enormity of all this. I can still see that father smiling down at his daughter with tears in his eyes.

And yet, it wasn’t until I became a father myself a few years later that I realized something else: his courage — I mean the father’s — how it empowered the intensity of his caring for that little girl, and probably contributed to the fact that she was doing as well as she was, given everything she’d been through. I didn’t get that at the time. The girl had already taken some dauntingly big steps in her life. That was clear. But later I realized: her dad was stepping up, too. Big steps. I felt honored that he shared with me about it. But I had to enter into a new phase of my own life and take some big steps of my own to really start to appreciate what was going on there.

So once again, courage can be contagious. And we can grow into greater appreciation for one another’s courage.

Once we start noticing it, we can see it everywhere. There’s courage baked into the skills people acquire, because everyone was once a ‘newbie.’ Doesn’t matter if you want to launch a business or play clawhammer banjo, hang drywall, write an essay or whatever, someone else has already taken some big steps in learning to do those things, and sometimes people will share what they learned in the process. That’s one way courage can be contagious. Courage can also be seen in every act of kindness and generosity. There’s courage in every couple and in every child, in every act of service, every truthful word that gets spoken.

Courage is there to be seen at the foundation of every loving relationship, and we can find vivid examples of it in people of every age and all walks of life.

And why is all this important? Why is courage ever important? It’s simply indispensable, and it’s built into the very center of who we are. It shows up in us in ways we may not even see in ourselves. We all bravely do things others wouldn’t dream of, and that opens doors for everyone.

So in a world where it often seems some very well funded people and organizations want us to focus on fear and all that is fearful, courage is really all around us, right there to be seen, still taking care of the things that matter, all the time.

That’s true whether we’re paying attention or not. But if we do pay attention to courage — to our own, our friends’, strangers’, anyone’s — my experience is, it changes everything. Once we start to see it, tuning our vision to the frequency of courage has the effect of ennobling and beautifying everyone we see. We can appreciate how amazing people are, even in their day-to-day, so-called ordinary lives.

What we see in others we can find in ourselves. What we find in ourselves we can better see in others.

We see the kindergartener taking big steps on the bus.

It’s always amazing.

And it’s always us.