Fear and courage are complete
opposites. They exist in all of us, creating a personality inside us. In
modern society fear is viewed as weakness and unenthusiastic, but I view
it differently. With fear, comes reason, good or bad, it is still reason.
With courage comes foolishness, good or bad, it is still foolishness. Even
though they are in constant battle with each other, creating a balance between
the two is crucial to living a good life. One cannot be too fearful or too
courageous in his or her approach to life's events, they must have both, in
order to move forward with utmost care and determination.
In modern society, fear seems to control us too much. Whether it be asking
someone to prom or making a choice to change our country, fear chains us,
preventing progress and movement. It stops us dead cold or in a scuffle to
decide not to act. Along with the negative is the positive mentioned before,
reason. Reason exists because there are downfalls that can result from these
decisions. Such downfalls can be measly or drastic, but always life changing.
Even giving into fear can lead to worse results, but we can never know because
we don't know what the future holds.
True courage is rarely witnessed today, but we always mark these people that
have this courage as "heroes". Stories of people saving lives
in burning buildings or from other dangers of sorts, display bravery of certain
human beings. However courage can get people either hurt or killed, trying to
save those people in danger, or other dangerous events, that fear would rather
prevent us from doing. Courage is the hardest to obtain because of this fear of
pain or death, but usually helps the most in our lives.
You have to have a balance, in order to survive or live the best you can. You
have to tackle certain events with bravery, but analyze the possible outcomes,
positives, faults, everything you can before making a life changing decision.
These decisions can take seconds to months, even years. An example of a slight
imbalance between the two is in the story of Hamlet. In this story, Hamlet
wants to avenge his father's murder, informed by a ghost of his father. In
doing so, he is justifiably hesitant, not knowing if what he was told was true
or false. It could have possibly been a trick of a demon, so Hamlet decides to
test the truth. He puts on a play in front of his uncle, the murderer, and
witnesses his guilt. Up to this point, there is a great balance of fear and
courage, he wants to murder him, but must know if he is the real culprit. Upon
witnessing the truth, Hamlet goes to murder his uncle, but stops once he sees
that his uncle has repented his sins. To their belief, now his uncle can go to
heaven. In personal opinion, Hamlet should have just killed his uncle then and
there, before other terrible events occur, but because of fear and reason
taking too much control of his decision making, every main character dies. Even though most people think Hamlet
is a coward, I think he was doing the best he could. Fear only beat courage by
the smallest bit in his scale, and tilted in a horrific favor.
This perfect balance between fear and courage is
almost impossible to obtain, because nobody is perfect, we all make mistakes,
and we all achieve great things. What we must realize is that people have to
start being more courageous, but be smart about doing so. Even I need to learn
to tip the scale in the courage side, because fear has too much of a grip on
me.
Very nice blog Zach :-)
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