Everyday Courage

Abstract

The world in which we live is crowded, so crowded that we can become lost in the experience of making our own way through. This can manifest itself in feeling powerless to protect ourselves from the pushing and shoving of others, relying on them for direction and meaning, being swamped and ‘petrified’ by fear and doubt and generally getting swept along above the ground never really knowing what it feels like to be connected to the earth beneath, to have a strong sense of our own being and to feel truly alive. Regaining our ability, in the midst of the resultant despair, to deliberately intervene in our own lives and live according to our own inner wisdom requires a constant commitment to be personally courageous. There is indeed currently a heightened interest within the psychological community and wider society in the concept of courage and specifically the importance of giving primacy to the subjective experience of courage when assessing its relevance to the challenges and obstacles that each of face in our daily lives. This paper introduces the five key components of ‘everyday courage’, namely, being, self-hood, choice, faith and creativity, surveys their antecedents in existential thought, assesses their significance for the challenge of everyday living and comments upon their relevance for and resonance with the practice of existential psychotherapy. Concluding thoughts highlight the need for both qualitative and quantitative phenomenological research in this field which would include a deeper emphasis on personal courage in the inter-relational dimension as well as studies of how everyday courage relates to different client groups and therapists from the existential as well as other theoretical orientations.