a long introduction on inspiration of my life.
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It takes courage to live a human life. We all have varying degrees of courage. For some, it is buried deep in hearts and psyches; for others, it is a bright light that guides every step. But, for all of us, finding courage can be a choice we make every day—often in the quietest of ways. There is great courage in living life to the fullest, living with authenticity and a sense of alignment with one’s most deeply held values. And sometimes, simply getting up every day and putting one foot in front of the other is an act of immense courage.
This book is a collection of some of the most powerful inspirations I have encountered about what it means to live a courageous life. Here you will find one hundred and thirty of my favorite quotations from some of the world’s greatest thinkers, looking at courage through many distinctive lenses—wise, funny, spiritual, philosophical, historic, artistic, religious, eccentric.
Poets are perennially drawn to the subject of courage because it touches us at our deepest core, speaking to the very essence of what it means to be alive—what poet Jack Gilbert calls “the evident conclusion of being.” For this reason, limiting this book to include only thirty poems with courage as their central theme was one of the toughest challenges I faced.
I open this book with John O’Donohue’s “For Courage,” a poem that sets the stage for an exploration of how a new understanding of courage can illuminate our lives and change everything it touches. This wonderful poem shines a spotlight on the possibility of creating courage out of life’s darkest sources, moments when the very notion of courage seems unfathomable.
I also offer thirteen stories of individuals whose courage defines them, each in a different way. These are chosen from among the hundreds I had the privilege of encountering—testament to the defining power of courage in so many lives.
Investigating the wonderful quality of generosity for my first book, Inspiring Generosity, taught me that we are all innately generous. If we are lucky, something, sometime, calls it forth, bringing into the light what I call “a lightning bolt of generosity.” But the true lesson from that book for me was that, when we experience an unexpected burst of generosity, it quite often changes us forever, leaving us standing in a new place, in a new orientation, with little appetite for going back to our former life.
All the lessons of generosity are very much alive in this exploration of courage. As with generosity, what interests me most is not a single spontaneous act but rather a life that is lived in a new orientation. The person who runs into the burning building to save a child engages in an act of bravery that leaves us awestruck—but what were the seeds of that act, and how does that act then inform the rest of that person’s life?