A Ripple of Courage
A few years ago, I attended the last birthday party before the end of the world.
On a warm night in March of 2020, we poured drinks and passed trays of homemade desserts from one laughing guest to the next. When the host asked, we gathered in the living room and sat snugly beside friends who, over the years, had crossed that invisible line into family. Someone played the piano, someone sang a new song, and before too long, I stood and shared the story of my great-great-grandfather, whose Wikipedia page begins like this:
Robert Brennan (22 July 1881 – 13 November 1964) was an Irish writer, diplomat, and founder of The Irish Press newspaper. He took part in the 1916 Easter Rising and later became the Irish Free State's first minister to the United States. He was the father of Irish-American author and New Yorker columnist Maeve Brennan.
It was Maeve who wrote the story I shared that evening, whose words brought a wry smile to my lips. It goes something like this: 98 years before our gathering on the eve of the end of the world, British police ransacked Maeve’s house for the second, third, or thirteenth time. My great-great-grandmother, Anastasia, knowing the officers would never find her husband, alternated between bemused humor and scathing rebuke with a speed only possessed by the wives of Irishmen. I relished sharing a ripple of light from a lake of darkness. We tell stories a little differently when we know the ending will turn out the way we want. Like a fairy tale that really, really happened.
But the world is not a fairy tale, and our own legends are far more complicated. Perhaps you are beginning to sense as I am that life is much harder to live well than I anticipated. The institutions we grew up idealizing and the people we believed were worth idolizing are further from perfect than we imagined they were as we held flashlights under covers and read about them. Little by little, maybe even as often as day by day, our optimism, maybe even our hope, is assaulted like a cliffside and eroded by forces far beyond our control. The world did not end after that birthday party, but something shifted in March of 2020 that I’m not sure has ever returned to its previous place. I’ve not met one person who doesn’t sense it, and yet we hardly discuss it at all, and if we do, it is merely to complain, shrug our shoulders, and soldier on.
But if you will forgive me for just a moment, knowing now that my inheritance is nothing less than the blood of dead Irish poet revolutionaries, I would like to say to each and every person who ever comes across this…
It doesn’t have to be this way.
You need not settle for things as they are or as they are heading. You have everything within you that is needed to shift the course of history for yourself, your family, and, if the opportunity presents itself, the world.
How?
Remember your fairytales.
What was it in the words of those stories we imagined ourselves in hundreds of times that moved us? Once, we were carried to sleep on tales of bravery, selflessness, and integrity. We fell in love not with characters, but with their character. But somewhere along the way, we grew up, and our imaginations grew smaller. Now, we are told that those ideals are childish or that the world simply doesn’t operate that way, and so we have grown disillusioned and depressed.
But I’m not convinced.
The last time I held my grandfather, his shoulders were wrapped in a blanket as he watched King Arthur. After 80 years of life spanning some of the most violent in history, he still found comfort in the idea that a hero can be anyone who is brave enough to stand against what is wrong.
Somewhere buried deep within all of us is this childlike understanding that the world could be a better place for everyone if we just decided to make it so. But when the very same opposition comes against us that we celebrate our heroes for overcoming, we find that steadfastness is costlier and more frightening than we imagined it to be. And so, in our fear, we abandon a fraction of our hope at a time, and into that space where it once resided, we pour whatever looks satisfying at the moment. Perhaps there are no bad people, only grown children so full of fear that they are willing to do whatever it takes to get into the liferaft, only to discover it leaky.
We live in a time of unparalleled complexity. I am not smart enough nor prideful enough to imagine I can solve all of the world’s problems, but I do know this to be true. If each of us were willing to be the kind of person we try and tell ourselves that we are, to lay down our lives for the sake of others, to make the selfless choice to sacrifice without the expectation of return, to speak with kindness and love, to move towards injustice instead of ignoring it, to spend the only life we will ever get on behalf of those we may never meet, then we wouldn’t need fairy tales or legends, we would, like Robert and Anastasia Brennan, become them.
Don’t be mistaken; it will be exceedingly dangerous. The stakes are astronomical: they’re everything the world holds dear, including your life. But the ripple effects of your courage may just pave the way for a wave of civility to push back against the occupying doom.
To start, ask yourself these questions:
What burned bridge of a relationship over differences in politics, religion, or lifestyle can you begin to rebuild today on common ground?
What grievance have you held on to for too long that it is time to forgive?
What selfish decision do you need to ask forgiveness for, even if the person you slighted is currently unaware?
What truly persecuted, mocked, or abandoned person in your workplace can you stand up for?
What point of view so counter to yours can you attempt to find a way to understand?
Have you sacrificed integrity on the altar of security, and can you find righteousness in the uncomfortable?
Are you making assumptions about someone instead of having a conversation with them?
You need not be perfect, but you have to try, and when you do, take comfort in the fact that you’re not alone.
There are more of us than the darkness can handle.