LIVING COURAGEOUSLY WITH CONVICTION AT THE HOLIDAYS

Over the past couple of days listening and watching some of the deluge of news stories, I have noticed that 1) many pundits and critics in the media are no longer shocked but now angry over Newtown Connecticut.; and 2) many people are scared and wondering how much more stringent safety measures should be?  It sounds like a form of grief to me of a very strong kind.

Collective Grief and the Energy it gives us

I think that we do experience grief collectively as a society and as individuals.  It seems to me that the media has this ability to connect us emotionally in a very strong way.   Other than the media we seem to experience it collectively as we disclose our feelings in the small talk we make in churches, barbershops, in grocery check-out lines.  We also seem to be grieving collectively in our facebook posts and comments.  We experience it individually as we feel our feelings looking at news aggregating websites.  We feel the energy that emotions stir making us feel like we should just do something.

Anger

Anger is a large energy generator.  At the risk of over-generalizing, it seems that much of the “empathetic” society including the fourth estate of media has moved into the anger stage of grief over Newtown.   They are looking for causes and some are making wide sweeping conclusions that there needs to be more gun control.   Some of the news analysis and opinion is focusing on the mentally ill in his country as the problem.

The energy that anger stirs is also manifested in the extra-large letter to the editor section of my local daily newspaper.  It is stirred in the late night comedy show I usually watch where the comedian came out and made a statement that recognized the tragedy.  It is present in the emotions of people who are critical of gun control laws and how something should be done to keep mentally ill people from having them.  The anger motivates us to stand and protect ourselves.

Fear

However, fear is also an energy that makes us protect ourselves.  Fear tells us

“run stupid there is danger!"

This appears to be showing up also in statements about making schools safer.  As I have heard the fear at my place of work, I have heard people go into laborious detail about what all the possible risks are in a place.

It is hard to say whether the fear we are feeling is tangled with the anger or whether the fear is a logical reaction unto itself, but there is talk about giving teachers guns to protect themselves and the students. There is talk about how things can be made more secure in schools.   This fear still may be part of the societal shock.  

Fear and Anger are Powerful Emotions

It is in times like these where we may realize again that anger and fear are very strong and powerful emotions or energies in motion.  I have to use the word “may realize” because both rage and panic short-circuit common sense.   The energy of the emotions often bypass the rational thinking part of the brain where you and I think through the facts and look at things in a problem-solving fashion and makes us impulsive. 

I am mindful of mob behavior.  Mobs of people can run for their lives together and then they can get angry and become a lynch mob or start a riot.  The one commonality is emotion—they all share it despite what they are actually thinking and act impulsive in unison.

On the flip side, people can be paralyzed by their feelings.  To see someone having a panic attack is like watching someone stuck in their seat on a roller coaster or like a victim in a horror film in terror just before the villain is about to attack.    When someone (whether adult or child) is having an angry tantrum, you cannot get them to do anything else until they have gotten over the emotion.   Emotions can be like G-forces that push someone back against a wall to the point where they cannot move.

One of my favorite shows is Survivorman with Les Stroud.  Again and again throughout his shows, Stroud will talk about staying calm if you are stuck in a survival situation.  Staying calm can mean the difference between life and death.

If you are reading this, you are not likely in the Arboreal Forest of Northern Canada or in the Amazon Jungle or in the swamps of Southern Georgia, but you are probably in an emotional wilderness where the pressures of the holidays are combined with the added emotional stress of the Newtown CT school shooting.   The feelings are powerful and perhaps are making you feel like you are beside yourself and frozen in anger and fear and feel like you are just surviving.  I think when we are stuck in such situations we need courage and calmness because we just cannot stop life as we know it just because of the Connecticut school shooting

Courage

Without looking at a dictionary, courage is essentially going along with the conviction of what the right action is despite the fear and emotion.  It seems to me that courage is romanticized through the movies and TV as big gestures of one hero fighting an army or the hero making a daredevil move for whatever reason.  (My favorites models of courage were John Gage and Roy DeSoto from the TV series Emergency who climbed up in high and dangerous places to rescue people.  John admitted he was scared in a few of the scenes.)  

In our real world, courage is not that exciting or suspenseful.  Courage can be:

• telling someone no. 
• walking away when they want to fight you . . . and maybe you might be called chicken by the bully,
• saying enough is enough to one relative badgering another relative at the family holiday celebration,
• buying yourself a present because you would like it despite having low-self-esteem telling you otherwise,
• doing the right thing at your job when others are not,
• going out to the malls and sending your kids to school despite the fear of what happened in Newtown CT
• going to that holiday family celebration and trying to patch things up with that estranged relative
• finding joy at the holiday season in some fashion or form

Courage is based on your context or situation, and it may be going against some crowd or “grain.”  Typically, you do not have courage without some type of conviction where you believe that some value or principle is worth the cost.   Usually the cost is someone calling you a fool—the vast majority of our risks in the world are not ones of life and death.

 One does not always act tough when showing courage.  When you are showing courage it can feel like the wind is blowing in your face at hurricane-force speeds.  Courage does not feel good until after you look back at it from the future.

I hold that there are people of courage everywhere that go on living and doing what is needed because it is the right thing to be doing.  I'm trying to be one of them.

I hope that if you are feeling paralyzed by your feelings that you can find courage to start moving again.  and do something in the spirit of the holidays.