The courage to be

A friend and I were talking about being brave. For us both, it was about having the courage to be yourself, to face yourself in the mirror and say “This is me, warts and all and I am ok with it.” It is also about knowing what you can do and having the strength to do it, never mind what people around you say and do. And it is about facing what you are in other people’s eyes and minds and being okay with it…or not…as long as you know what you are about. It also about giving answers to questions that make you uncomfortable, about being able to give rather than take, and the knowledge that you have the power to hurt and therefore you will not.

I once met someone who didn’t have any of that, not in the brief time I knew him. He seemed to be honest and straightforward, with a mind that wanted to absorb, to explore, to know. He read books that ran the gamut from food to photography, but somehow never got curious enough to peek into the wide and wonderful world of fiction…or else never admitted that he did. He was always asking questions, often with the wonder of a child, filing away the answers in a mind that seemed almost a library catalogue of information. And he seemed to revel in minutae, expanding on every second of the life he lived rather than seeing the bigger picture of his life in the context of the world he lived in.

But, for all his virtues, he had a startlingly closed mind. He did not see himself as others saw him, not people he interacted with, not me, whom he said he considered a friend. He would not communicate unless forced to, and even as he spoke to me and many others about so much, he said so little. An art in itself, I know, since I often practice it myself. Where I spread my feelers wide and say a little about a lot, he said a lot about very little, going vertical, in the Internet portal sense of the word, rather than horizontal. As someone to know, it was about the most irritating and frustrating experience I could think of.

This man had great charm, a sweet smile and much that was endearing in his personality. He also had a frightening arrogance, a dismissal of what did not seem relevant or important to him, never mind that it could hurt and even damage those he came across on whatever level. That, perhaps, was my least endearing memory of him. Even as he wandered through his own life, he rarely saw how he may have bumped into other’s, causing a certain kind of impact that was damaging and unforgivable.

He did that in my life too. He came into it suddenly and left even more suddenly, without warning or announcement. He left me and those who form my own mesh of my world bewildered, wondering what had happened and why. Even as I struggled to understand why anyone would go out of their way to cause harm to me, I felt a certain relief that I could continue travelling my own journey without too much lasting impact. Analysis of myself showed me that the effect he had had was not a lasting one, no damage that could not be quickly repaired had been caused. If I had allowed myself to be less wary, less unguarded, less accepting, the story may have been different. It took a day or two to know that, but I did.

And the reason was simple. I knew what I was about. After all, I had the courage to look into myself and see what I had done. And I knew that he would never be able to do the same…not while looking into a mirror, not while looking at himself, not while looking into my eyes, where he will see nothing but the question he will never be able to answer honestly and satisfactorily: Why?