Reforming our lives

"Courage is the power to let go of the familiar."
- Raymond Lindquist

We tend to fear the unknown while embracing what is familiar. This is true even when we know that what is familiar may be wrong or even harmful.

We stay with a religion whose belief set we have bypassed with our own thinking. We remain in the same job because changing might expose us to something risky, or expose our weaknesses to others.

We continue to live in the same neighbourhood because it's the one we know, even if our neighbours are unpleasant people we would prefer not to associate with.

We live with the same mate because separating means new and frightening life possibilities.

Others leave their mates believing that anything different would be better. That may require more intellectual blindness than courage. For a relationship is one factor in our lives that can be reformed.

Reforming a failed relationship, that takes courage. It requires us to let go of the familiar in order to learn new things about the needs of a relationship, the needs of our mate, our own needs that we may not have recognized. A failed relationship cannot be reformed without new learning.

Any kind of new learning requires courage. To accept new information into our lives and process it in order to use it as knowledge that can transform our lives requires courage because we might have to accept that we have been doing some things wrong. Things that have resulted in the failure of the relationship.

Accepting that we have been wrong requires courage as well. However, we can't build our lives without it.

I imagine it like completing each layer of a pyramid. There is comfort in completing a large part of a complex job. Yet it takes courage to launch into another layer.

A pyramid cannot be complete without its pinnacle and we can't reach our own life pinnacle unless we keep doing things that require courage.

Neither a pyramid nor a life may be built in a day. Each requires many small acts of courage. And once in a while it requires a major act of courage.

Courage requires us to let go of the past and do something frightening and new.

Bill Allin
'Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems,' striving to show courage by example.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/cgi/index.pl