“You know, sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage. Just literally twenty seconds of just embarrassing bravery. And, I promise you, something great will come of it”.
We Bought a Zoo
I like that movie.
It may not seem like it, but it’s all about Love. All kinds of Love; past Love, new Love, misguided Love, misunderstood Love, compassionate Love, Love for all living things, selfish Love, selfless Love, self Love. They’re all there. It’s like the entire biography of Love in an average person’s life painted across a half dozen sub-plots in a movie about a family that buys a zoo.
And, it’s personified with one virtue, courage.
Courage is derived from the root word cor; Latin for Heart. In its earliest form, courage meant to “speak one’s mind by telling all one’s Heart”.
We experience many different Loves throughout the course of our adventure in life. Not people as Loves, but Loves that call upon different parts of us. Parts of us to give, parts of us to receive, parts of us to learn about and parts of us to evolve. Whether we can put our thumb exactly on when or where each of them came be or which have not yet crossed our path, is not so much important. Whether we attach a value of “success” or “failure” to these Loves, again, not what is significant. What it’s about, is courage. It’s about the old paradigm of what courage is supposed to be; “all one’s Heart”.
Emotion has a way of falsely imprisoning our thoughts. It’s not Love that does it, it’s fear. It’s the unwillingness to demonstrate and, simply, be courageous. It is the unwillingness to be of all one’s Heart that creates our unseen prison. The fear to find the twenty seconds to be completely and entirely vulnerable is actually what restricts us from finding our strength.
I think about the lost potential for Love; the lost potential for Love because of a lack of courage. And, it’s true; all it wants from us is twenty seconds or, usually, less. The trade off is a brief moment in time for what could be, what would be, a life of Love and presence in your Heart.
It takes but just a moment to tell someone you Love them. Or, a few seconds to abandon your pride and speak with whoever you’re not on speaking terms with. It takes those same few seconds to truly admit to yourself what you need to do better in your life for you. Saying “I’m sorry” is less than a twenty second endeavour. Offering forgiveness and compassion might seem like it would take a long time, but the actual decision to do so doesn’t. Choosing to open your Heart up to the one you Love can happen in an instant.
Courage just asks for one thing; for you to have faith in it. When you do something for the right reason, the right outcome will happen. I know that many an argument can be made that will say, “well, if I say this or do that, I don’t know what will happen. It’ll take me way longer than twenty seconds to navigate through the rest of it”. And, that can certainly be true, but that’s not what courage is asking you to do. Courage doesn’t worry about what comes next because it knows when something comes from the good of the Heart, something good will come to the Heart. As soon as we start introducing any thought that isn’t that, fear starts to take over. That’s why it only takes twenty seconds. It only takes twenty seconds to tell yourself that your Heart wants something good, something beautiful.
Think about trading twenty seconds to get twenty days, or twenty months, or twenty years. Twenty seconds of courage from the Heart and of the Heart will, actually, get you a lifetime of Love, every time. The more of that kind of courage that you find, the more Love finds you.
Be Love.
