By the time I was eighteen, sports had taken their toll. I’d gotten a concussion while horseback riding, broken my arm in three places skateboarding, bruised my tailbone playing football, cleaved my patella in two skiing, fractured my other patella slightly while diving, and had much of my face rebuilt after a martial arts tournament fight went horribly wrong.
All in all I’d say it was a productive childhood.
I mention all of these things because my cohort, Lybi Ma, recently posted a blog (Checking Not Whacking) bemoaning the recent rise in childhood sports injuries. It seems everything from concussions to knee injuries have become commonplace among kids—well, good job kids.
The one factor that has meant more to my life as an adult than any other is “courage.” Which is to say, without those broken bones and other childhood discomforts I don’t think I would have ended up where I am today (and what I mean by where I am today is happy).
That’s right, for me courage is completely and utterly entwined with happiness. I don’t think you get one without the other and—while this is about as unscientific an idea as can be found (meaning it’s based entirely on personal experience) it's as much of a creed as I have.
In my last book (West of Jesus: Surfing, Science and the Origins of Belief), I argued that my personal secret to happiness has always been to find the thing that’s scaring me and head straight for it. And, truthfully, that’s not all that far away from the “technical” definition of courage.
Psychologists often define courage as a combination of persistence and fear or, more accurately, as persistence in the face of fear. This is not a new idea. Aristotle defined courage as something one develops by doing courageous acts. In other words, Aristotle felt that fear was an innate part of courage (you have to move through the fear to get the courage) and more modern psychologists do not disagree.
In 1990, psychologist SJ Rachman defined courage using three different components of fear: the feeling of apprehension, the physical sweat palms, weak knees response, and the behavioral fight or flight response. Rachman decided that courage is the uncoupling of fear’s components from action, meaning you resist the behavioral response (you don’t run away), despite the profound discomfort produced both by subjective/emotional reactions and by our physical reactions.
In other words, get scared, but still plow on through.
And this isn’t just my opinion. Study after study after study has also found that most of the time fear is inversely proportional to happiness. Which is to say, the road towards joy is paved in courage. Or, as Anais Nin once wrote: “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
The point here is not only that kids should be allowed to break bones, but parents should learn to not mind. Those broken bones are the only way to learn that the thing you’re afraid of is by no means as bad as the fear itself.
