Choose Pains of Courage or You’ll Suffer Pains of Safety
Los Angeles — where I live — is filled with creative-types.
People pursuing unreasonable dreams where merit doesn’t play a role and the odds are not in their favor.
You always hear of people becoming lawyers, doctors or joining the military because they felt pressure from their parents.
You’ll never hear that about a writer, actor or painter.
If anything, their folks did everything they could to discourage them from chasing their goal.
The reason is they know they will experience a ton of pain. They’re pretty much throwing themselves at pain.
Pain of rejection, instability, no money, insecurity, etc., etc., etc.
It takes a ton of courage.
Any time you put yourself out there, you will face pain.
But what most people don’t realize is that safety comes with its own, worse kind of suffering.
Pain Is Inevitable, But Not Equal
“A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once.” — William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
The pain of courage is immediate
It hits you and you feel it fully, piercingly, presently…
BAM!
NOW!!
FUCK!!!
It’s an uppercut to the jaw, shrapnel to the leg, a blindside by a Mack truck.
But it’s YOUR CHOICE.
You chose to enter the ring, run toward the battle, race across the freeway.
Being courageous implies taking action in spite of the pain you’ll feel.
This pain hurts in a deep way. A bad way. An aching way.
But you will get over it because your pain does not define you — your courage does.
The more courageous things you do, the more courage becomes who you are.
Safety though? That’s another story. You see, the pain of safety is not immediate and often not perceptible for a while.
The pain of safety is insidious
in·sid·i·ous:
proceeding in a gradual, subtle way, but with harmful effects.
Safety is the sibling of fear. They go hand in hand.
After all, what does safety imply? It implies you’re guarding yourself against something that you’re afraid of.
And what are you afraid of? Pain.
The pain of rejection, instability, no money, insecurity, etc., etc., etc.
So you retreat from putting yourself out there.
You retreat from the things you want to do and have, the places you want to go, the people you want to know.
You study a subject in college that bores you, but it’s a “good life choice”. You don’t ask out your crush, so you settle for a partner who doesn’t make you happy or excited. You spend money on things you don’t want just to impress others. You surround yourself with people who don’t build you up — maybe they even make you feel better about yourself because you think you’re better or something.
And you convince yourself that this is what you want.
All the while, that beautiful dream you had in your core starts to decay, then rot, then become septic. And that poison slowly seeps from your core throughout your limbs and into your mind. And what’s worse, you begin to spread it to the people you come into contact with, especially the people you have influence over — like your kids.
This pain doesn’t hurt like a singular, deep cut.
But you feel it, you know it’s there even if you don’t know what it is.
Until the day you wake up and realize: It’s you— YOU have become your pain. you are defined by it. It IS You.
You have made a series of fearful choices, and now fear is who you are.
And it will remain that way forever…
…that is until you decide to have some courage.
So Choose
You can’t escape pain.
It is a color on the palette of life.
But you can choose the type of pain you’re going to experience.
You might choose courageously today, you might choose safely again. I’m not here to motivate you.
But from what I’ve heard and experienced, the pain of safety fills you with regret, begets more fear, and is the path to a wasted life.
Whereas the pain of courage fills you with lessons, begets more courage, and guarantees a life well-lived.
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This article is Day 7 of the 30-Day Fishbowl Series
You can start the series by clicking HERE.
