Courage

I have kept myself captive in my home over these past few days reading. I love a good book. The kind of book so good you become obsessed and spend an entire day wrapped up in it loosing your sense of reality. That kind of book.

My latest read, I will admit was the final Harry Potter book. It was by chance that I ever started reading them. My younger brother and my father had both read the first one and wouldn’t stop talking about it. I kept protesting that it was a children’s book and really didn’t have any interest. But they said just try reading it and I would see why they loved it. They were right. By the first chapter I was hooked. I can’t explain what it is but J.K. Rowling has a way of writing that makes you feel like you are not even reading.

What a unique group of books. She has created stories that have captured the interests of several different age groups and that will be shared for many generations to come. And if you want to view them as children’s books, they carry a more realistic lesson to be taught about the reality of life and its ups and downs then any fairytale I have ever heard.

The one thing that stuck in my mind the most after finishing the books is they are about a story of courage. The whole series is about the choices you make and how they affect your life as well as others in your world. Looking past all the magic, the stories remind us that life is not easy and that you will have hard choices and some will be painful. That is something I can support far more then teaching children a story about a glass slipper.

This young boy in the stories has the weight of saving his world on his shoulders, literally, and over the years you see the kind of character that his courage builds from the choices he makes and the lessons he chooses to learn from his mistakes. How many of us feel like we have the weight of our world on our shoulders, figuratively, and what do we do about it?

One of my favorite quotes is “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage”. I love looking and respecting life in this way. And it is the amount of courage we let ourselves have that helps us make choices. It is not easy to have courage but in the times that I have found it, I have had my life expand from those outcomes. The times when I have not, I watched my world narrow and have been left with regrets.

The choices don’t always have to be epic like the characters’ in the books, like saving someone’s life or fighting for your country, although those are the easiest to identify. Most choices can be a little harder to see in our everyday lives. But we know when they present themselves by the feeling we get in the pit of our stomach. And then we have to make a choice.

That is the part that builds our character. Making that difficult decision and facing the outcomes. Even when we are too scared and do nothing, ironically that is still a choice and has outcomes we face; sometimes greater then what we originally feared. Some of those even become the baggage we carry with us from not finding the courage in ourselves to act.

Developing courage in ourselves is something to be proud of. If you haven’t read the books, I urge you to do so they are a good reminder of this. I hope you love them as much as I did. And it doesn’t hurt to have a little magic in your imagination. Who knows what creative doors it might open.

Until next time.

Christy