Take Heart
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In her TEDTalk “What Fear Can Teach Us,” novelist Karen Thompson Walker tells us that fear can be understood as an amazing act of the imagination; as an unintentional storytelling that we are born knowing how to do.
Fears have the same elements as stories, she points out: characters, usually us and the ones we love; plots, usually catastrophic ones; and plenty of suspense. The task, she argues, is to read our fears like stories, for the glimpses of wisdom and insight they have to give us. This makes sense to me, because over the years, stories themselves have helped me manage my fears.
As a child, Maurice Sendak’s beloved book Where the Wild Things Are, controversial at the time for its scary monsters and gnashing of teeth, gave me a safe place to look at those terrifying beasts on the page in front of me and confront them there, at a safe distance.
As a teenager, the diary of Anne Frank and novels set during the Holocaust allowed me to dip my toe into acknowledging the evils of this world from the safety of my own soft bed—to encounter even the idea of such evil, to see the tenuousness of all our lives in such a world, and survive that knowledge. Every child deserves to first encounter evil at such a distance. All too many don’t. Still, all children need tools to help manage their fears.
In an article for The Atlantic about Maurice Sendak, Joe Fassler writes:
In his book The Uses of Enchantment, child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim suggests that fairy tales help children externalize, and ultimately diffuse, their deepest anxieties. ‘The child must somehow distance himself from the content of his unconsciousness and see it as something external to him [if he is] to gain any sort of mastery over it,’ Bettelheim writes. This is why so many fairy tales take place in the deep and mysterious woods, he argues—it is the realm of the subconscious, where the wandering child-mind can encounter its fears and wants in reified form, then neutralize them.
Alas, I must not have neutralized them all, as I have gone from being a worried child to a worried adult. The other day, when my husband forgot to tell me that he was going to be home late, and then didn’t answer his phone when I called, for just a moment my imagination ran away once more. What if the lights had gone out on his bike? What if he was in a ditch somewhere?
When he got home, I yelled. No, I declared forcefully, “I was worried about you. I pictured you in a ditch!” He apologized, and when I had calmed down he said, “I love you too.” Aha.
If our fears are themselves compelling stories, then they most often have something to tell us about what we value, as all stories do. Our fears are not something to shun or shut away, but rather powerful stories about the true depths of our care.
In other words, our worries are drenched in love. And honestly, sometimes I think it’s a miracle we don’t all walk around this world scared out of our wits all the time. Our hearts are so tender, and the world around us is beautiful and awesome, but it is not tender. Life is fragile, contingent on so many things, and we love it so much.
From the storybook Wild Things to the wilds of life, eventually we grow up and realize that we don’t get to control the story. The monsters don’t stay on the page.
Somehow we keep on loving anyway, keep on living. And that is courage. Not our capacity to overcome fear, but the capacity to move through life in the face of loss, in the fact of change.
Perhaps courage is simply the beating heart of our story, or better yet, the story of our hearts. In this way, courage is a fact of our lives. Life stretches our hearts, and lo and behold, they grow and do not burst or shatter.
The poet David Whyte says:
We are here, essentially, to risk ourselves in the world… we seem meant to hazard ourselves for the right thing, for the right woman or the right man, for a son or a daughter, for the right work or for a gift given against all the odds. And in all this continual risking the most profound courage may be found in just the simple willingness to allow ourselves, amidst the hazard and vulnerability, to be happy along the way…
After all, when we’re doing it right, we walk this earth giving away pieces of our hearts, and not always into safe-keeping. It is a huge risk. But what joy it brings us. It takes courage beyond belief to trust our hearts to love, and yet every person, perhaps every creature on this planet, does so every day. We are already brave.
Listen, you are here with pieces of your heart scattered across the country, the world. And you are already brave. Because some of those pieces have been shattered by betrayal, or loss, or tragedy, or simply change. But still you give them, and have found a calling in life to give more. You are already brave.
The miracle is that love has not left me quivering on the floor in fear. Love has made me braver. I have climbed mountains for the love of my spouse, and dealt with worms for the love of my dog. I have pursued this wild and crazy calling with the love of my family and friends. I have pursued justice with your love and partnership.
If I did not love, I’m not sure I could leave my house each day. So, yes, opening our hearts puts them at risk. But opening our hearts is also what makes us brave. Perhaps courage, like the heart, is just a muscle—in us already, pumping away without notice half the time as we move through our days, sometimes noticeable only when working hard or causing pain, but always, always made stronger with exercise.
As you move through the challenges of life, I invite you to remember that you are already brave. We can, each of us, practice the courage that sustains us, not through acts of valor or physical prowess, but through the simple willingness to extend our hearts a little further, fill our stories a little fuller, keep our imaginations working away in the service of love, so that our story becomes an exercise in compassion, strength, and hope.
- Take Heart - February 1, 2020
- The Theology of Desire - March 1, 2019
