on Courage: The Little Girl in the Shack

The Little Girl in the Shack

There is a girl, five years old, sitting alone in a little shack in Siberia. it’s not her home, she is in a foreign land, harsh conditions. She was deported with her family few weeks before. 

Her family: parents and older syblings, has been taken to work all day in a labor camp,  and so she waits. 

Hour after hour, she waits without knowing when they will come back. She is my grandmother. She is now 92years old.

I think about her often. 

She occupies my memories filled with love, great food, patience and resistance.

But from time to time grief takes over and a question keeps coming back:

- how much of that waiting room is still inside me?

Because here is what I've noticed. Survival is a very clever houseguest. It doesn't announce itself. It slips into my decisions quietly, and it makes them look sensible. 

Stay small. Stay safe. Don't rush. Don't move. Don't want too much. It happens so often, and so unconsciously, that I rarely catch it at work.

And of all the states I know and experienced, this is the one that frightens me most. 

Not danger itself, but living as if danger never left.

So lately I've been learning that courage doesn't look the way I once imagined. 

It isn't a battle cry. It's much quieter than that. It's the willingness to stop running, to stop avoiding, to stop procrastinating, and also to stop leaping into rushed decisions just to escape the discomfort of not knowing. 

It is simply being present. Looking at what is, with a mind that's still willing to grow.

And then comes the part that undoes me.

Everything that happens to me can be read in more than one way. Every single moment is a page that can be interpreted in a hundred ways. And the way I see reality is a choice I make, moment by moment, even when it doesn't feel like one.

My mind will always offer me the old story first. 

It goes digging into the past, finds a familiar fear, and says, here, use this, it fits. And it does fit. That's the trouble. Fear and struggle and despair have been nesting in me and my family for generations, and they are so well settled that they feel like the truth.

But the truth is something that’s repeated and believed. 

I can ask: what is the most useful way to see this, right now? 

Not the most flattering or the most naive, but the one that opens me toward love, connection, health and growth.

It takes courage to look at the same moment from a different angle. Real courage, the kind that makes my body shakes building new neurological pathways. 

So when I'm asked what I'm brave enough to do, I think of that small girl in the shack, and I try to answer for both of us. 

I want to follow my heart, even when it isn't the easy or familiar way. I want to choose what is healthy over what is merely known.

She waited so that someday someone in her family could stop waiting.

I'd like to be the one who finally walks out the door, I have her resilience not her circumstance. I will use it.