Definition

The window was pushed open to its limit when I woke this morning. The room was filled with a cold, clean air and my bed gave warmth and weight like I have not felt since last winter. Fall and winter are seasons of solid sleep and long, steady breaths. The morning was filled with moments of ease and focus, a balance of routine and low effort reflection or planning; nothing too heavy on this Thursday morning. My mind grasps and contracts at certain repetitive holes like a climber upon a face, testing, challenging a hold, before clamping in and committing… or moving on and bringing presence of mind onto the next hold. The coffee I pull from the cabinet is a welcome sight after I had planned on walking to Downpours for my seemingly regular Thursday morning on their patio drinking two cups of drip before riding to work. But I wanted to make a good breakfast and rise into the morning unrushed and enjoying the first day of a Colorado fall. So the coffee was there and it allowed my mind to settle into this physical space of my apartment kitchen and my morning table. One of the holes that my mind has been bouncing in and away from for the last three or four weeks has been a task of defining courage, defining vulnerability, what that thing is to me and what role it plays in the person I want to be, the best self I am pursuing. It is one value among a few others that I am currently working through and defining and plugging into my life and my thought patterns and my actions. Maybe I was naive, or maybe I had some confidence from how efficiently I had defined the first two values on my list of things I wish to emulate and live through. I was proud of and confident in my definitions, the clarity and the stone pillar they offered me, but maybe that pride or confidence added a feeling that this task would be an easy one and it would pretty much write itself. But here I am a month after writing “Courage/Vulnerability” at the top of an empty page in my notebook. The only thing I have written under it is that it has been difficult to define. I wrote that last week hoping to ignite some flow of words and tensions in my body that would create the definition of courage, the definition of vulnerability, MY definition of those two things. But the rest of the page lays untouched. Other topics and writings have come and been injected into that notebook, but I kept that page blank hoping to return to it and fill it with gleaming, glorious prose, words that shock me into a burning pursuit of bravery and openness with myself and others, something I can read in my days to come and feel the emotion ripping open my chest and letting my tongue unfold into the world, speaking my truth and speaking my story. Maybe that’s what this is, all of this. This fucking essay. This fucking blog. Maybe that’s what I am. Maybe all that I do, all of my words, written and spoken, and even unspoken, unwritten, are attempts and actions in the pursuit of courage and vulnerability. Maybe I am the courage, I am the vulnerability. But no, my mind pulls away from that as soon as I have written it. Courage is the pain and the warm contraction I feel as I write, as I speak to a loved one, as I pursue my improvement. It is the essence of those things, the energy that pushes me to seek improvement, to be a better person. To pursue improvement, to strive towards your potential, one must expose themselves to the consistencies of mortal life: the uncertainties, the anxieties of the future, the fact that things will not be as imagined, that pain will come, that understanding will not be smooth and perfect within yourself or among others, that the air will catch in your throat, that your grip will fail, that your legs will pulse and shake under weight, that your words may fatigue, that your love and compassion will be tested, that your compass and your ultimate task in life will be doubted, and that the skepticism will be pushed towards it not only by the external world but mostly by you and the mirrors and the faulty excuses you give yourself out of fear. To understand all of that and to continue to rise in the morning, to breathe as steady as you can, to decide to act, and then to pursue a better self… that is courage, that is making yourself vulnerable. Because you know it will be worth it, it will make all of the doubt and anxieties in those consistencies of life frail and whithering in the face of your compass, in the light of your ultimate task. All else falls away when you expose your soul to the elements of the universe and you open yourself to yourself and to those around you. Nothing can touch you when you have liberated yourself from fear. Rip open your chest, let it spill through your words and your actions. Have courage in the shade of mortality.