“The only courage you ever need is
the courage to live the life you want.” Oprah
I saw this quote on my friend’s
coffee cup at work last night. It took
me a moment to figure it out, possibly because I was about as sleep-deprived
and spacey as it is possible to be and still be functioning. But I think a larger portion of my confusion
comes out of the fact that, as good as the quote sounds, its logic is a bit
flawed.
The implication here is that all you
need to do is make a leap of faith to get the life you want. Take risks, chase your dreams, the usual
motivation we hear from graduation speakers.
The implication is that if you have the courage to defy expectations, to
ignore “common sense” and turn down that job selling insurance, you’ll be able
to build a life doing exactly what you want.
It’s a pretty picture, isn’t it? A
very American ideal—take charge, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, find the
right door and burst right through.
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When we are young, we believe that
we’ll step off the college campus and right into a four-bedroom house, a
six-figure job, and a happy marriage. In
college, we dream of world travel, of art and culture and fine dining. The reality is much more complicated than
that, as most realities are. What we don’t
realize until we are out in the world is that those lives we imagine for
ourselves have to built from the bottom up.
To buy a house or even rent an apartment, you need money, and that takes
years of carefully stockpiling your wrinkled singles and diving for every penny
you see. To get that amazing job, you
need to make connections with the right people (or even the wrong people), send
out dozens of resumes that often disappear into the ether, and tear your hair
out in frustration. And when it comes to
relationships, you may find yourself in a string of losers (of either sex), be
trapped in an interminable pairing with someone who isn’t right, or even find
yourself standing alone, wondering if there’s even one person in a hundred
miles who is not repulsive or taken. The
old adage doesn’t say that a journey of a thousand miles can be accomplished
with a single step. There are many, many
more steps that have to be taken before we reach our destination—assuming that
you even know where you’re going, which is not true at all for most of my
generation. I know how tempting it is to
take an easier, if less inspiring path.
True courage for me, then, is in
those who just keep walking. Those who
don’t let the long hours and sleepless nights wear them down. Those who take rejections and hang them on
their walls to motivate the next try.
Those who show up at their dead-end job every day and do their best at
it. Those starving artists who neatly
stack their pennies so they won’t actually starve. Those who come home at three in the morning,
rub their eyes, and sacrifice sleep to the dream. Those who don’t let this cold, crowded world
drag them down into the rut of doing work they hate to make more money to be
able to continue doing work they hate.
It’s true courage to live on that line, compromising common sense and
foolish hope, trusting that yes, you will have enough shifts to make rent and
enough free time to make you happy. And
honestly, though it may be terrifying sometimes, I can’t see any other way,
because for me, the cost of accepting the easier path is far too high.
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