Today is Courage.
Courage of course is not an absence of fear, but taking action despite the fear. This is undermines the popular idea of following your heart. If by that one means to be guided by love, ok, but there is a thread in new age thinking that you should trust your instincts, respect your intuition. And indeed a great deal of what we know and how we decide is completely unconscious and imbued with a sort of wisdom borne of a million years of human evolution, enough in fact to even doubt the existence of conscious free will. It’s hard to really grok how consciousness, which we feel so completely as our essential being, can be so post hoc–be such a small part of how we negotiate our lives, and this follow-your-heart idea is a way to try to connect with that hidden ante hoc being.
Follow your heart asks you to act based on the vaguely icky feelings one gets when entering a situation, most credibly involving human interactions. And of course this “something told me” vibe is your massive subconscious processing power picking up and evaluating a myriad of unrecognized cues coming from other people, and it is often absolutely correct. The human brain devotes huge resources to social interactions and is very good at these sorts of predictions of another’s behavior. But following your heart is often understood as a sort of quasi theistic fatalism in which an omniscient “universe” sends one protective impulses, an idea that gets validated when this powerful social brain is verified when that guy does in fact turn out to be really icky.
But then if we respect that processing power, shouldn’t we indeed follow our hearts, and obey its messages? Of course we should pay attention to and be guided by these subtle and spontaneous emotions like fear, but we should not follow them, we should put them in context, question them and see them in the perspective of this process, because in the past few hundred years we have built effective bulwarks against most of the things we spent those million years evolving to intuitively protect ourselves from. This is where courage comes in. Often these pit-of-the-stomach reactions are the result of calculations wired into our brains in a very much more dangerous world. Our fight or flight reflexes are largely obsolete for most of us in the absence of saber tooth tigers or hand to hand combat. Our fear of the unknown and of the stranger now mostly just dysfunctional xenophobia. So that often in our modern safe world, our fear, our intuitions, may be more of a disadvantage than an advantage. That terror at asking the boss for a raise, at trying that new experience, that intuition that nothing good can come of this, may actually cripple one and impoverish one’s life.
So listen to your heart, just don’t obey it. Try to face and feel these fears and intuitions, then try to evaluate them and their what’s-the-worst-that-could-happen potential. Most often we will be richly rewarded by screwing up our courage and pushing ahead, suppressing our fear and intuition, taking the leap and going boldly where no one has gone before.
HOLLY DAYS 