A call for courage
Take courage. Be courageous.
What does that mean?
You can associate courage with success. With names that are known. With people who stand at the front and blaze honorable trails. Courage can be big & bold.
Courage can be found in the quiet corners. While listening, learning, reading, reflecting...grappling. It can be found in the moments of discomfort where rather than choosing to get offended and leave, you choose to be vulnerable and stay.
“Courage is the most important of all virtues,” Maya Angelou writes, “because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.”
It takes courage to create safe spaces. to serve the oppressed. seek justice for the marginalized. take responsibility for negative impacts and understand different perspectives.
We can replace hard truth with enthusiastic fluff and skim through life, unscathed.
We can get defensive, offended, and exit situations completely.
It is easy to do things poorly.
It is easy to stay stagnant & never grow.
It takes courage to get things done & do things well.
There is a call for courage, so how do you answer?
Courage runs in the blood of those who turn tables, rise above, and make strides for change. It is seen in every black life still speaking & standing. Still fighting. Still moving forward. Still pressing on. After all this time, to rise up and say ‘Onward’. That’s courage.
And as allies, we must follow suit. It takes courage to admit ignorance & seek help to grow from biases.
It’s not a sign of weakness, but rather one of humility, recognizing that the important things in life are meant to be conquered collectively, from all angles, from every corner. Meaning we must show up. At the sound of ‘Onward’ we must rise up and reply ‘I’m with you.’
As allies, it’s imperative we listen. Not just for a week, or the rest of the year… but listen all the way through, for a lifetime.
The moment something sounds convicting, where discomfort arises there is a call for courage… to stay, and sit with it.
Not flee, and forget.
As allies, courage is pouring our energy into learning, growing, and fighting to understand… not fighting for ourselves to be understood.
