written for the afraid

There is a difference between courage and fearlessness. To be fearless is to be ignorant and stupid in your ways, but to be courageous is to know you’re afraid and yet to still be in control. Courage is not the ability to have no fear, as to no longer be human, rather it is to be able to look at your fears head-on and admit you’re afraid but to continue to stand.

I fear tomorrow as I fear an hour from now. I do not know what will happen nor do I know if I’ll even have a tomorrow, but whether I do don’t doesn’t matter. I am to live in the present for the future, not in the future of the present. An ant does not worry about whether she will be crushed within the next minute but instead works vigilantly for the time she has for her sisters and mother.

We are in the middle of a trying time. Fear is all around us. Fear is within us. If anyone tells you that they don’t fear tomorrow they have lied. The truth is we are all scared but that fear should never be given control. In the months that are to follow, ask yourself something. Is your life finished? The answer should be “I don’t know”, because the truth is most of us don’t know. We don’t know the future. Not even our own. But courage is the ability to stand up and say to the unknown that you don’t own me. Stand up and say to each other, the truth. You are scared. We all are, but isn’t that what makes us human? Aren’t we supposed to help our neighbors through hardships, loving them as if they were of our own family?

I don’t know what the future holds but I do know that whether we like it or not, Future is readying his pitching arm for the throw, and we need to be ready to catch it scared or not. Because that is what separates courageous from the cowards