New Year, Old Words

Here in Rhode Island, we have had fairly warm weather. So many people receive it with trepidation, citing global warming. They worry what this means for the future. In other locations, people worry about an influx of refugees or an exodus of the most educated and skilled workers. Nearly everyone worries about violence, whether in schools or in terrorist attacks. At this time, when the Gregorian Calendar restarts, I find it important to recognize that in the midst of these concerns, there are many voices that express principles of courage, steadfastness, joy, and flexibility.

These words by Eleanor Roosevelt seem as apt today as they did in 1960…

“There is another fear problem which is growing more widespread and which, I think, we must do all we can to check at the source. Increasingly people are growing afraid of what is in store for the world. They wonder whether they should plan to go in for professions and build homes and bring up families.

‘There is so little security,’ they say. ‘We don’t know what to plan for.’

Well, what security did our first settlers have when they embarked on the Mayflower? Only what they could create for themselves with their own courage, their own activities, their own trust in themselves to be able to meet any situations–all unknown, all threatening–that they might encounter. It is the only way anyone can plan his life.

Today the world faces a great challenge: on one side a government preserved by fear, on the other a government of free men [people]. I haven’t ever believed that anything supported by fear can stand against freedom from fear. Surely we cannot be so stupid as to let ourselves become shackled by senseless fears. The result of that would be to have a system of fear imposed on us.

Courage is more exhilarating than fear and in the long run it is easier. We do not have to become heros overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appeared, discovering that we have the strength to stare it down.”

Source Text: You Learn by Living by Eleanor Roosevelt (NY: Harper & Brothers, 1960): 40-41.

Photo: Hiroshi Sugimoto, Indian Ocean Bali, 1991 (from here).