On courageous determination
A chef stands outside the Israeli embassy in Tokyo shouting “Stop Genocide!” He goes back every week on his day off. A man on the southern of coast of Sweden collects plastic from the beach. He goes on holiday once a year to Greece, where he continues to spend hours scouring the shores for washed up waste.
A broken-hearted farmer plants a forest of 6000 oak trees that reveals a heart-shaped clearing. It’s a message to his wife who has passed away. It went unnoticed for 17 years until a hot air balloonist spotted it.
A teenager in Uttarakhand decides to stay in his village and tend to the land with his mother. He picks up some work online as a freelance coder. All his friends have left for well paid jobs in the city.
Zen monastics chant “Namo’valokiteshvaraya” invoking the name of the Bodhisattva of Great Compassion, individually out of tune, but together, generating harmony. They are confident that their voices will reach and hold someone overwhelmed with sorrow. Meanwhile, a lay person in a small apartment in Seoul meditates to a live video stream of an active volcano in Iceland
A music teacher in Gaza uses the sounds of a nearby death drone to teach children musical scales. A bedridden woman in a nearby time zone writes letters to banks and supermarkets urging them to boycott, divest and sanction. A teenager stencils STOP ELBIT on an office block.
Palestinian music teacher Mohand Ash uses drone sounds to teach school children scales.
100 people silently hold signs outside Parliament in London knowing they will be arrested. Amongst them a disabled, elderly man, a former priest, a teacher. Others gather in silence, holding hands and sitting on the ground near the Mahatma Gandhi statue in Parliament Square, surrounded by as many as 20 police vans.
An artist makes a zine to raise funds for the music teachers’ mutual aid fundraiser.
These are all acts of loving persistence born out of a deep understanding that individually and collectively, all our words and actions matter.
As living beings, we are all born with courageous determination. It is part of our animal DNA, part of our natural state of interbeing. It’s our unbridled man-made systems—economic, didactic, cultural—that try to strip it away from us, replacing our natural instincts with the fear of shame, rejection, and not belonging.
Is this by design? What we do know is that we have a chance to come together in community and harness all of our natural pent up creative energy for the good. We can creatively and incrementally design our way out of collapse. Courageous determination will help us find new ways to do that. We need an all-hands-on-deck approach to shape an en masse, heartfelt poly-response to the polycrisis.
The good news is- we only need so many of us to reach a tipping point to trigger meaningful change. History tells us the figure is around 25 percent.
From Naomi Ortiz Disability Justice Activist
A boss at an advertising agency asks an employee: “What is the opposite of an F-35 fighter jet?”
“A haiku poem,” she replied, without skipping a beat, her eyes narrowing imperceptibly. She is used to containing her rage. It takes a lifetime to train a person to choose conformity over truth, day in, day out, she thinks.
Courageous determination is life-affirming is the opposite of soul crushing, imposed helplessness. Courageous determination chips away at fear, despair, and sadness with daily acts of Metta – loving kindness. And it acts not from ego, or promise of reward, or outcome. It is the daily practice of continuing to witness, and to engage – and to allow joy and creativity, despite fatigue, loneliness, and uncertainty.
Yusuke Furusawa, another man in Tokyo on the 600th day of solo protest says in an interview, he does it because he needs to stand up for what is right, to raise awareness and tell the world to protect international law.
A doctor leaves her own children with her mother and aunt to help a cooperative Reveil de Kananga to open six Child Friendly Spaces in Congo, which will provide psycho-social care to 10,000 children affected by the conflict.
Courageous determination can also be as simple as speaking from the heart, without rehearsal, firmly positioned in the present moment; speaking about the personal even as your voice shakes. Speaking as an act of vulnerability, letting the inner biographical, selfless “I” unmask, in resistance against pseudo-philosophical platitudes or easy conclusions. It is the loving interconnected personal “I” that chooses again and again to do hard things in the name of truth and human dignity.
Courageous determination contains within it, “sisu”—the Finnish word for endurance. In Islam, ‘sisu’ is held within the highest form of deep faith known as Yaqeen” (يقين). It contains all the defiant optimism of Chardi Kala, a Punjabi term, that signifies a state of resilient high spirits, even in the face of adversity.
Courageous determination is a faith that embodies feminine endurance too – the ability to sit with discomfort and contradictions, the capability to love someone or something because of – not despite – their flaws. It is the activist’s voice, the artist’s practice, the teacher’s kindness, the parent’s patience and generosity. It is the lover who becomes the carer. Courageous determination is stoicism fused with tenderness, and most of all, love.
If you know any terms in other languages that embody Courageous determination please write to me on imaginarylife at hotmail dot com.