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About This Author
My name is Joy, and I love to write.
Why poetry, here? Because poetry uplifts its writer, and if she is lucky enough, her readers, too. Around us, so many objects abound to write about. Once a poet starts with a smallest, most trivial object, he shall discover that his pen will spill out what is most delicate or most majestic hidden inside him. Since the classics sometimes dealt with lofty subjects with a lofty language, a person with poetry in his soul may incline to emulate that. That is understandable. Poetry does that to a person: it enlarges the soul and gives it wings. Yet, to really soar, a poet needs to take off from the ground.
 
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Daily Cascade #1098248 added September 29, 2025 at 12:59pm
Restrictions: None
Courage Doesn't Always Roar
Prompt: Courage
"Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is a quiet voice at the end of the day saying, 'I will try again tomorrow.'"
Mary Anne Radmacher
What do you think courage is? Is courage an innate quality, or can it be learned and developed?
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Oh, all those faces of courage! Is it the one that shows up when life tests me or is it my willingness to face pain, danger, or something unfamiliar, just to help someone else? How can I tell since courage has its shadows, too?
To begin with, I could never be that soldier on the battlefield or the mountaineer scaling a cliff. By the way, I wasn't ever a mountaineer but I tried once to climb a hill with ridiculously funny results, which I wrote about in a blog entry several years ago. Maybe, at that time, my physical courage needed re-education. Come to think of it, it still does.
In addition, there is also that moral courage, which pops up on its own, when I don't do or accept what others accept and do. Although I usually try to steer away from such situations. I guess, however, my forte (sometimes) is emotional courage, which aids me when I have to endure grief, forgive betrayals, and face a challenge or an illness without much complaint.
I think, most things considered, courage, in its essence, is not the absence of fear. It is an internal decision to step up to a challenge, even with fear in one's heart. A firefighter who runs into the fire does not run fearlessly; rather, he still reaches out a hand to save another despite the smoke in his lungs. In such an instance, fear doesn't cancel courage; rather, it carves it.
Yet, some name recklessness as courage. Recklessness or boldness is only noise; that is, noise without thought. In the same vein, I don't believe aggression is strength either, as stubbornness is not bravery. Such attitudes and feelings, like false mirrors, only show a frightened or hurt spirit.
True courage, then, is not always dramatic or loud. It often shows in the smallest of actions like an offered apology or a confessed truth, or a hand extended to help a friend or even a stranger. In many ways, courage can and does develop and can be learned and refined. I happen to think that, possibly, we are put here on earth to learn and gain courage, since without it, our existence is empty and pointless.
So, now, after all what I said and thought about here, I can conclude that, in a nutshell, courage is the strength that reshapes fear and turns it into resolve.
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