Beautiful Things Break First
Courage doesn’t look like a movie poster.
It looks like a man kneeling in the dirt, elbows deep in a broken engine he doesn’t know how to fix. It looks like a woman standing at the threshold of a small office, resume folded and sweaty in her hand, ready to ask for something she’s not sure she deserves.
Hard things aren’t battles with banners and bright lights. They’re quiet. Dull. They don’t welcome us in. They sit heavy in your gut like a bad meal, waiting to be dealt with.
Most people think courage is the loud part. The shouting. The running into burning buildings. The declarations.
But real courage is smaller than that.
It's quieter.
It's showing up to a place you don't want to be, doing a thing you don't know how to do, with people who may not notice or care that you did it anyway.
I used to think brave people felt brave. Turns out, they mostly feel sick.
Turns out, they mostly don’t want to be there either.
The difference is, they go anyway. They pick up the wrench. They knock on the door. They make the call.
Their hands shake. Their voice cracks. They go.
There’s an honesty to it.
A person facing a hard thing is stripped down to bone and wire. No slogans, no armor. Just an awkward, flawed human doing a thing because the alternative is worse. Staying stuck. Giving up. Settling.
That's what makes courage ugly and beautiful at the same time. It is the choosing, not the winning, that matters.
You don’t have to be ready. You won’t be.
You don’t have to be good at it. You won’t be.
You just have to step forward, looking stupid, feeling stupid, and do it badly if you must.
I once saw an old man fix a fence alone in the rain. His hands were shaking, and he hammered the nail wrong three times before he got it. The fourth time, the hammer slipped.
He cursed, not loud, but bitterly.
He sat back on his heels, wet and steaming in the cold air, and looked at the crooked fence he'd built.
Then he got up, limped to the truck, and came back with more nails.
No one applauded.
No music swelled.
No lesson was learned except this: He could have quit.
He didn't.
That's courage.
It’s ugly, it’s boring, and it’s the only way anything worth doing gets done.
The hard things wait for us.
They don’t get smaller while we hesitate. They don’t get easier while we explain.
They just sit there, grinning their yellow teeth, patient and mean.
You either walk toward them, or you stay where you are and rot.
That’s the real choice.
And every morning, you make it again.
Maybe you start small.
Maybe you don’t lift your whole life at once.
Maybe you just fix one crooked board.
It’s enough.
It’s ugly and slow and enough.
And tomorrow, you’ll do it again.
Not because you feel brave.
Because it’s the only way forward.