Courage Reps
Tomorrow’s events:
Stoic Breath w/ Steve Beattie. Every Wednesday @ 7:00 AM ET. RSVP here.
Embodied Book Club: Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck. Every Second Wednesday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Transparency Tube w/ Mark Ledwich and Sam Clark. January 13th @ 8:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
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January 12th, 2021
I woke up at 5 AM, then texted my friend: Go go go!
I stripped naked, got into the shower, and felt into the resistance. It was telling me, “no, don’t do this brah, go back to bed.”
The inner voice of a coward.
I turned on the water, to the coldest setting possible, and felt the cold rush against my body. Man, it was fucking cold this morning. Good.
I have this crazy friend who lives in Montreal, and we have an ad hoc practice. When either of us is feeling sluggish, and want the next day to start well, we text the other the night before and ask “5 AM?” This means we wake up at that time, and upon waking, we check-in, then without thinking or hesitation we enter the cold. We call this the “daily slap,” and as he wrote about before:
Daily comforts have softened us. While each of us faces various difficulties, modern office life is taxing us both mentally and physically—turning us into jellyfishes or amorphous blobs—leaving us much weaker than our ancestors who worked in the fields or waged war on the frontline. Cold showers remind us of the brutality of life, like a daily slap in the face.
I used to take cold showers daily, and I loved them so much I even delivered a speech about them during my public speaking days. This practice is what the Stoics call “voluntary hardship,” which is the practice of putting oneself in difficult situations with the purpose of building resilience. I think I am going to return to this practice, and start taking daily slaps on a daily basis.
I want to feel into that cowardly voice now, the one that I mentioned before. Focusing on the felt-sense of this cowardliness, it wants to engage in a recoiling motion, and say “no” to the important things. It wants me to look away, turn away, run away. To express the voice more generally, it would say the following …
Whatever you are trying to do, it is not worth it. It will cause too much trouble, too much discomfort, too much pain. Why are you doing this to us? To me? Stop this now. We do not need this. You are being stupid right now. Be comfortable, live comfortably. That is pleasant. You like what is pleasant. Go now. Enjoy the comfort, and leave these silly thoughts behind.
This cowardly voice will not shut up if you let it keep going. The thing is not to shame it, but listen to it, say no to it, then do what you said you were going to do. This is the basis of courage, one of the cardinal virtues. Courage, or fortitude, or even fancier—fortitudo, is something I define simply as: doing the shit you do not want to do but need to do, and this shit is discomfortable, painful, and in some cases could even bring death.
Courage is set up by prudence of course, or practical reason, or even fancier—prudentia. If you reason this is something you should be doing, in the service of a heavenly life, then you’ll need to act on it. Courage is what allows your reason to be actuated. In most cases it will not be easy, because what is easy is walking down the broad way, not the narrow way.
I sense it is good for me to return to taking cold showers on a daily basis, in a slap-happy way. It is time to get my courage reps in. Be more consistent in 2021. This year is not going to get after itself. Thumos needs to be trained, and fed, to be at the ready.
It is 6 AM now, and I am listening to the Road to Joy from Bright Eyes, and these lyrics just arrived right on time, pumping me up:
Well I could have been a famous singer
If I had someone else’s voice
But failure’s always sounded better
Let’s fuck it up boys, make some noise!
Then he said: I’m wide awake, it’s morning.
Yeah. I am wide awake, and it’s morning, and this steward is ready to get after it.
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