Reclaiming your life takes guts
Photo by Nathan Dumlao
Courage, by Anne Sextion
It is in the small things we see it…
Anne Sexton, 1975
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap…
The road to meeting our goals isn’t an easy one. We have to give up things. To meet my goal — financial independence — I must watch friends continue the 24/7 money-purging orgy as I stay the course. It feels like they’re leaving me behind. (Get it? BEHIND?!! 🍑 😂)
In the emergency room when a patient has tried to kill themselves by swallowing too many pills, they are given active charcoal.
The charcoal works by entering the stomach and soaking up the poison. It then passes through the body carrying those poisons safely out.
Active charcoal may be administered more than once in cases of severe poisoning.
There are so many fears and horrors in life that threaten to take us hostage. They want to hold us back from our goals. They want to poison our aliveness.
We have only two options:
Give in to the poison, give up on our dreams. Let our fears kill us slowly from the inside out. Or take that first step of courage.
I choose to swallow the coal. Welcome courage into myself again and again. And again and again, I make my way forward in this world.
I am so afraid. But I keep moving forward, keep taking that next step, and the next.
Taking control of your finances takes guts. There is a loneliness to it.
It’s lonely because your eyes are suddenly wide open to the mess we’ve all gotten ourselves into. You see the people around you jaded with discontent, only animated by the excitement of to that next purchase.
It’s lonely because you have sudden epiphanies growing out of this awareness, but there is no one to tell them to.
It’s lonely because you see your best friends making decisions with their money — their lives — that you can no longer get behind.
It’s lonely because people so often interpret your self-restraint as selfishness.
Most of all, it’s lonely because you look up one day from the busyness of your brave new life and — to your surprise — find yourself content. Contentment loves company. And yet, contentment is so very rare.