Sunday, 3 October 2021

The Courage to be Ordinary

 

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasm, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.

Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly, is titled after the last two words of Theodore Roosevelt’s The Man in the Arena speech. She begins the book with the quote and returns to it as she wraps the book up. Perhaps at this point your pupils are darting from one side to the other or your brow is furrowed in an attempt to reconcile daring greatly with being ordinary; intuition would put these very far apart on the continuum of being. But I see them essentially communicating the same message: That of showing up in your life in the way only you can. And that requires a lot of courage because we are inundated with a lot of things that would make showing up difficult and sometimes debilitating.

 

The title of this blog is inspired by Paul Tillich’s seminal work The Courage to Be. Tillich writes extensively of how we are in the grips of an anxiety crisis and how this anxiety threatens our ability to BE in this world. He differentiates it from fear because fear can be faced, analysed, overcome and even endured. Fear always appears as a definite object and therefore in a way makes room for you to participate in it; you have agency and while it may not be easy facing the objects of your fears; it is entirely possible through courage. Whereas, anxiety is a pernicious thing in that it permeates everything, the very air you breathe and therefore it cannot be faced as you would fear. As a result it threatens your very agency; because how do you begin to fight that which you can’t even point out or localize? Tillich writes ‘Anxiety is finitude, experiences as one’s own finitude… it is the anxiety of nonbeing, the awareness of one’s finitude as finitude… it expresses itself in loss of direction; inadequate reactions, lack of intentionality… the reason for this sometimes striking behaviour is the lack of an object on which the subject (in the state of anxiety) can concentrate. The only object is the threat itself, but not the source of the threat itself, the source of the threat itself is ‘nothingness’.’ This ‘nothingness’ is where courage is really needed. It is quite easy to be courageous in the face of things that affirm your being, perhaps courage is not even needed there but courage is necessary in the face of things that threaten your being; the nonbeing. Which is why Tillich’s writes ‘courage is the affirmation of one’s essential nature, one’s inner aim or entelechy, but it is an affirmation which has in itself the character of ‘in spite of’.’ This ‘in spite of’ comes in many different forms and Tillich elucidates on these forms which basically mark the human condition today; what the modern man is facing. ‘There are three types of anxiety according to the three directions in which nonbeing threatens being. Nonbeing threatens man’s ontic self-affirmation relatively in terms of fate, absolutely in terms of death. It threatens man’s moral self-affirmation, relatively in terms of shame, absolutely in terms of condemnation. It threatens man’s spiritual self-affirmation, relatively in terms of emptiness, absolutely in terms of meaninglessness.’ In the words of the Apostle Paul, ‘we are hard pressed on every side’ and with depression being the leading cause of ill health and disability in the world; some of us are crushed.

 

In W. H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety, he writes: ‘We would rather be ruined than changed/ we would rather die in our dread/ Than climb the cross of the moment/ And let our illusions die.’ One of the reasons that some of us are crushed is because we have clung to the illusions that do not work for us anymore or we refuse to face the crisis that we are in. John Vervaeke in his Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series defines courage in a very specific Tillich- inspired way. He says courage is not just bravery (the facing of danger) nor is it just fortitude (the enduring of difficulty); courage is facing the meaning crisis head-on and rejecting anything that responds to the crisis in any way that is not good. Courage is a virtue; it involves the wisdom to see through the illusions and the distortions of fear or distress to what is truly good and to act accordingly.

 

One of the uncourageous ways that history has responded to the meaning crisis is through the adoption or implementation of pseudo-religious ideologies such as Nazism, Fascism, Marxism, Fundamentalism etc. which tried to resuscitate religion apropos Nietzsche’s death of God. Tillich writes ‘The anxiety of emptiness is aroused by the threat of nonbeing to the special contents of the spiritual life. A belief breaks down through external events or inner processes: one is cut from creative participation in a sphere of culture, one feels frustrated about something which one had passionately affirmed, one is driven from devotion to another to another because the meaning of each of them vanishes. The contents of the tradition, however excellent, however praised, however loved once lose their power to give content today. And present culture is even less able to provide the content. Anxiously one turns away from all concrete contents and looks for an ultimate meaning, only to discover that it was precisely the loss of a spiritual centre which took away the meaning from the special contents of the spiritual life. But a spiritual centre cannot be produced intentionally; and the attempt to produce it only produces deeper anxiety’ or as Vervaeke puts it ‘has drenched our world in blood’. Akwaeke Emezi in Dear Senthuran: A black spirit memoir, writes ‘Illusions are the best things to burn, I think, but some people consider such fires to be threats, and those who start them even worse’. Tillich himself courageously incinerated illusions against the Third Reich through more than 100 radio addresses that implored Germany, to recognize and reject the horrors of Hitler. Courage is always on the side of the good, and acts out against any illusions that detract from the good. The courageous dare greatly. Maya Angelou addressing Cornell University in 2008 said ‘Courage is the most important of the virtues, because without it no other can be practiced consistently, you can be kind and true and fair and generous and just, and even merciful, occasionally but to be that thing time after time, you have to really have courage.’ Angelou, Tillich, Vervaeke all have illustrated how courage is a virtue that points to other virtues, pointing to the true and the good i.e. the transcendentals. Tillich writes that courage does not eliminate anxiety, the existential nature of anxiety not allowing its removal, but courage can subsume the anxiety of nonbeing into itself. In order for this courage to be to not be threatened by nonbeing then the courage has to be powered by something that transcends both being and nonbeing. Vervaeke suggests that one of the ways you can face the meaning crisis is by moving from a horizontal teleological narrative (where you are caught in your personal history and future) into a vertical ontology where you ascend in terms of virtue; where you become more and more of yourself i.e. Platonic atonement or Aristotelean self-actualization. All these point to transcendence.

 

One of the ways the meaning crisis has reared its ugly head is in our culture’s obsession with purpose. People have been rendered catatonic by the need to live meaningfully or by the weight of feeling they are living purposeless lives. We are bombarded by cataracts of social media images and celebrities who seem to be killing this life thing and making a killing while at it; who seem to know what they are here for and meet every day with a vitality we crave and that exsanguinates the life out of us in comparison; that embroils us in the drama of the narcissism of small differences. Always trying to find the thing that makes us unique in comparison to others; that makes us believe we should be simply adored for who we are. Brown writes, ‘when I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see shame-based [shame lying between relative guilt and absolute condemnation] fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong or to cultivate a sense of purpose… I see through the cultural messaging everywhere that says that an ordinary life is a meaningless life… I know the yearning to believe that what I’m doing matters and how easy it is to confuse that with the drive to be extraordinary. I know how seductive it is to use the celebrity culture yardstick to measure the smallness of our lives. And I also understand how grandiosity, entitlement, and admiration-seeking feel like just the right balm to soothe the ache of being too ordinary and inadequate.

 

Meister Eckhart writes, ‘People should not worry so much about what they do but rather about what they are. If they and their ways are good, then their deeds are radiant. If you are righteous, then what you do will also be righteous. We should not think that holiness is based on what we do but rather on what we are; for it is not our works which sanctify us but we who sanctify our works.’ Let us not get caught up in the world’s insistence that our works should produce insta-money or insta-fame. Emezi calls this necessary work, The Spell. ‘The spell is clear: face your work. I inhale it like a meditation sometimes, to counter the panic of a life mutating too fast, when I wake up every day as a different person inside a different world. Everything else can shift however it wants, but the work will always be the work. No matter what changes, that instruction is still the same.’ We should also not buy into over-consumptive culture’s ideas about having something to show for our lives beyond actually showing up for our lives. As Phil Ford writes in his essay What was blogging?, ‘Hoping You’ll have something to show for your life is a mug’s game. What we want is something to show we’re living.


In his book, Tillich evokes the image of a knight in full armour riding his steed through the valley with death and the devil on either side of him. ‘Fearlessly, concentrated, confident. He looks ahead. He is alone but he is not lonely. In his solitude he participates in the power which gives him the courage to affirm himself in spite of the presence of the negativities of existence.’ Brown makes use of the man in the arena who stumbles, with a face marred with blood and sweat and dust. Both of these examples illustrating people showing up to the task or work at hand, in spite of. Emezi writes, ‘Even when seized by a thousand fears we can make strange and wonderful things simply for the sake of the strange and the wonderful, we can create without permission, we can [work] into the unknown.

 

In light of being stared down by what Tomas Bjorkman calls the meta-crisis: the interlacing of ecological, spiritual, existential, socio-economic, mental health crises of our time tied with the cultural pressures mentioned above; to be ordinary is itself a courageous act. To show up in spite of is to dare greatly. To decide for yourself what the meaning of your life will be (Viktor Frankl vibes) or to decide that life is meaningless (as Tillich says that the act of accepting meaninglessness is in itself a meaningful act). You can still show up in your life and in the lives of others, regardless what you choose to do with your life. Emezi writes, ‘The manual stays the same: to try until you can, to be bold and patient.’ To be excellent, to be good, to be courageous. To dare greatly with our eyes cast upwards. To say yes to life in spite of everything as Frankl’s recently released collection of essays is titled. Or as he puts it originally: Trotzdem ja zum leben sagen.  

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