Maya Angelou on Courage:
MS: If you could speak to the world community, what message would you most want to deliver to humanity?
Ms. Angelou: I would encourage us to try our best to develop courage. It’s the most important of all the virtues, because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can be anything erratically—kind, fair, true, generous, all that. But to be that thing time after time, you need courage. We need to develop courage, and we need to develop it in small ways first. Because we wouldn’t go and say, “I’ll pick up this hundred-pound weight” without knowing our capacity. So we need to say, “Oh, I’ll start by picking up a five-pound weight, then a ten-pound weight, then a twenty-five-pound, and sooner or later I’ll be able to pick up a one-hundred-pound weight.” And I think that’s true with courage. You develop a little courage, so that if you decide, “I will not stay in rooms where women are belittled; I will not stay in company where races, no matter who they are, are belittled; I will not take it; I will not sit around and accept dehumanizing other human beings”—if you decide to do that in small ways, and you continue to do it—finally you realize you’ve got so much courage. Imagine it—you’ve got so much courage that people want to be around you. They get a feeling that they will be protected in your company.
This hit me today, possibly because last week, I was having a conversation with someone with very different political views than me. While I can appreciate that we are all entitled to our own opinion, due to my nature of not wanting to ruffle feathers, there are many times I stay silent. Always after those conversations I walk away feeling awful, betrayed by myself. Just because I don't verbally say I agree with them because I don't actually voice my own beliefs, I am in a sense agreeing with them.
In a world where we are taught to get along and I always valued my gift as a peacemaker, how do I stand up for what I believe in without "gasp" people getting upset? I always tell myself, you're not political, you don't have enough facts to back up your opinions. I'm beginning to realize how much that "voice in your head" gets in the way. You think it's there to keep you safe, you see a homeless person outside your grocery store asking for money and maybe you'll give him a dollar, but your inner voice says, make sure you don't make eye contact, you don't want to encourage him to ask for more. You see a couple having a spat and it's getting heated and your voice says, stay out of the way, she can handle it, she's obviously been dealing with it for awhile.
So today, I am giving myself permission to tell my inner voice to shut up. Maya Angelou says to start with a five pound weight, for me that means stating my opinion confidently because everyone is entitled to their own opinion and I've got to go with my gut.
