Accessing Garden-Variety Courage

“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I’ll try again tomorrow.”

— Mary Anne Radmacher

The uniqueness of our experience leads us to face similar challenges to each other, yet always with an incomparable perception of those particular experiences. Life requires this above sense of garden-variety courage, if we’d choose to live it well—or as well as can be expected.

Your garden-variety courage is the ever so common expression, lived in a trillion different ways by persons of a billion or more dissimilarities. Garden-variety courage is common to all who try.

In other words, garden-variety courage is known to basically every human being, by the matter of their waking up and trying again, each and every day. We know this personally. We know how, by life, we feel destroyed by night, yet we’re not defeated by recognition of the day following when we arose and took on our worlds once more.

Acknowledging Our Courage

It’s a simple, though relatively rare thing; to take stock of this personally manifested courage, seeing it within us, and even patting ourselves on the back for it. This courage we exemplify in merely living and breathing and walking and talking is eternally creditable.

Only we can try our best. No one else can do that for us. So, we’re credited.

And as we make our daily decisions, as they’re committed to word and action in the moment, we can notice our courage to not buckle by running, and we can enjoy the knowledge that our courage makes all the difference.

One Foot In Front Of The Other

When courage of the garden-variety is analysed, found pound for pound in what its substance is, we notice this thing about it—it’s nothing more complicated than putting one metaphorical foot in front of the other.

By doing this, we’ve agreed to sustain belief in ourselves, even as God believes in us.

When we believe in ourselves enough to continue on a hard path, one at times filled with pungency and drudgery, putting one foot in front of the other and so on, we exist by faith big enough to make required differences, yet small enough to never be too difficult.

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The dust of life is resiliency in a form that’s so common everyone’s done it. To know that true courage occurs when we get up on the difficult-to-get-out-of-bed morning, when hopelessness invades, or in the prayerful evening where we feel contemptible, as fatigue breaks us, is truth to inspire. You’re courageous just in living. Exercise your garden-variety courage, afresh, today.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.