Where is Bravery Kept
We’d all like to think we’d be brave under the most difficult circumstances.
Some of us are. Certainly any woman that’s ever given birth to a child has been brave. For that matter, anyone who’s ever decided to be a parent in any capacity has at least been brave (if not always wise!)
But this doesn’t feel like bravery at the time. It’s just what you have to do.
I’m talking about standing up against a bully. Or a crowd. Or going against any grain whatsoever.
The risks are substantial.
The more vulnerable you are, the greater the danger. Whistleblowers have been known to lose their jobs and any possibility of renewed work. And political dissidents have been known to meet a much worse fate.
As things go in this country, you can predict that bravery may get harder and harder to come by. The risk will be too great. At some point, only those with nothing to lose, those who feel they have no choice (whether they do or don’t) will be the brave ones, and the rest of us will settle into survival mode.
Are we lost? What are we to do? Where does bravery go?
It doesn’t go away. It goes to hide somewhere it can be safe.
It goes into the arts.
I’m not talking about political theater, books like Fahrenheit 451, or “Guernica.” Or even Marina Abramović in her 1974 art piece in which she allowed anyone to use any of 72 items on her in any way they saw fit. That kind of bravery goes without saying.
I’m talking about the millions of little recitals and performances that go on year after year, the dances, the art shows full of oil paintings.
Are these beneath our contempt for their lack of consequence?
Surely not. Everyone in those circumstances has been very brave. It’s just that bravery isn’t the point there, only a necessary component.
And because it’s a necessary component, the arts serve a very special function in a society where bravery becomes more and more impossible. It allows it to hide, to breathe, to exist.
It lives in the child who has to bow to all those strangers she’s about to play to, the ones that she might mess up in front of, and never play the piano again. It lives in the author who has to submit their manuscript to the 99th publisher that’s going to say no. And when it lives, it survives.
And when it survives, it’s like a flame kept hidden, through endless winter nights, capable of lighting a thousand fires given the right opportunity. It must only be kept alive. One little flame can do it.
Bravery survives in me even when I’m not brave, when I’m not in a fighting mood, when I’m not willing to take a risk. It morphs and becomes some other part of me, the part that gets up in the morning, the part that risks being laughed at, the part that wrote this essay.
The arts are available to all of us. Anyone can take part in the process of keeping that courage alive no matter what terrors pour down on us. While not an umbrella to protect us, the arts are a vital part of what gives us the capacity to warm and dry ourselves after.