Imagine the scratchy edge of a diving board twenty feet above clear, slightly lapping water. Your knees are bent – whether in nervousness or preparation for the jump, you aren’t sure. Or, picture an audience, hidden behind the stage curtain, quiet with anticipation for the show to begin. You’re backstage, remembering the notes, or the lines, or practicing those pirouettes one last time. The stagehand draws the curtain back for you, and it’s time to go.
What will it take for you to jump from the diving board or walk across the stage and perform? Your willingness to let go of fear. When you dethrone fear, you truly engage life.
The history behind the word engage is very illuminating. The word has roots in Old French, where in the twelfth century the word engagier meant something like to pledge. This makes sense if we think about another word: engagement, representing betrothal, pledging yourself to be married to another. You become engaged to something by giving it something of yourself — in the case of marriage, you give up total control of your life, agreeing to work with another person. You do this because the person’s presence is more valuable to you than complete control of your life. The idea of engaging with life works in much the same way. If you want to experience all life has to offer, you have to invest in it by giving it your attention and time – and, most importantly, giving up the power that fear has over you. When you give this up, you will be able to have courage, an essential component to engagement with life.
An engaged life necessitates the confrontation of fear. You have to press on doing what you already know you should do even though you are afraid: This is courage. In the 1940s, the British writer C.S. Lewis penned a definition of courage in his novel The Screwtape Letters. He writes, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.” Courage always acts on other virtues when you are afraid – and courage describes the expression of these virtues in times of stress. It’s saying that your passion for diving is more powerful than your fear of heights or that your love of performing is stronger than your fear of audience rejection. Courage bridges passion and an engaged life – it’s the key to living not without fear, but instead without the power of fear to prevent you from doing exciting things that lead to an engaged life.
However, courage does not exist in a vacuum – relationships with others is key. You may be standing on that scratchy diving board alone, but there could be people behind you cheering you on. You might be backstage by yourself, but people you know could be in the audience. Their presence reminds you that if you fail, you are loved no less than you were before – and, conversely, that your success won’t make them love you any more or less. Relationships remind you that your identity doesn’t change if your courageous act fails or succeeds. This gives you confidence to embrace courage because you know that whatever happens, you will always be secure in the love of another person.
And, ultimately, if you have relationships that reveal to you the depth and meaning of love, you are already engaged in life. It is the love of other people that spurs you on to engage in life in brand new ways, to try something scary and new and promising, encourages you – literally, fills you with courage! – in the process, and, in the end, reminds you that you are already engaging in life through having relationships grounded in love for each other.
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