The most thrilling things we experience are often the most dangerous, or at least, the most terrifying. We need not risk life and limb to have a need for courage. Life is full of situations where we risk something much greater than our lives. We risk living with a mistake, and that, as far as I’m concerned, can be much more humbling than something as simple as death.
As Tom Robbins said in, Another Roadside Attraction:
Courage? You risked your life, but what else have you ever risked? Have you ever risked disapproval? Have you ever risked a belief? There’s nothing particularly courageous in risking one’s life. So you lose it. You go to your hero’s heaven and everything is milk and honey til the end of time, right? You get your reward and suffer no earthly consequences. That’s not courage. Real courage is risking something you have to keep on living with. Real courage is risking something that might force you to rethink your thoughts, and suffer change, and stretch consciousness. Real courage is risking one’s cliches.
Love is a lot like that. It takes courage, resiliance, and sometimes, it just isn’t very pretty.
In the film, Look Back in Anger, the character Jimmy Porter (played by Richard Burton) has one of the best and most telling statements about love:
It’s no good fooling about with love, you know. You can’t fall into it like a soft job without dirtying up your hands. It takes muscle and guts. If you can’t bear the thought of messing up your nice, tidy soul, you better give up the whole idea of life and become a saint, because you’ll never make it as a human being. It’s either this world… or the next.
We are at our most vulnerable when we love. We are ourselves, we risk rejection, and fear heartache. We risk our souls and our cliches. We risk who we are.
It’s like taking a raft down the rapids. You may know the general path, you may know where the really difficult parts are, but no matter how many times you’ve run the course, there are still surprises. There are sections that have changed and places that have stayed the same.
The past is haunting, and we are all haunted by it. We have our baggage and we have our issues. But it’s these very same things that make us who we are. I am who I am because of the path and the choices that I’ve made, and I’m not sure I’d change any of them.
Even still, there’s no good purpose grasping at straws, if for no other reason than you can’t lend a hand. Or take one. You can’t keep what you hold as long as your fingers are balled in to a fist.