There are many people in our community who are courageous, people who feel fear and move through their fear.  For many of us the greatest act of courage is quitting a job we don’t believe in and establishing ourselves anew in the work of our passion.  For others it is simply speaking our true feelings in the face of judgment. Courage is always about acting in the face of our own fear when nobody else is willing, when others are busy saying I have to because they told me to. 

Dr Marshall Rosenberg has suggested that it is just this attitude of “They told me to!” that leads to many of the atrocities committed in the world.  Somehow they fool themselves into believing that if some one else tells them to commit an atrocity they are no longer complicit because they were ‘after all’ just following orders.  There could be nothing perpetrating more grief than this disease of ‘bureaucratitis’.  Yet most of us at some time have taken this easy route.  And most of us soon after, if we were astute enough, discovered how utterly useless such action has been.

For most of us this is the way we discover what we truly care about and it is in these little moments of integrity that we discover our own courage.

I remain very grateful to Norbert and the many other examples who have blessed my life with their courage and taught me how to find my own courage.