How Indigenous Wisdom Redefines Courage as Being, and Not Conquering
Courage is confused with conquest – a fixation on victory, obsession with the results, and measuring life in terms of victory and defeat. However, beyond the strict calculations of victory and defeat, there is a more silent, deeper courage. It is a type of courage represented by the indigenous people of Gujarat and Jharkhand, who live in a close relationship with nature rather than fighting against it.
Their boldness is not proclaimed by grand displays. It lives in the mundane aspects of life.
Rise with the sun
Have respect for nature
Give in to the unknowns that the anxious intellect strives so desperately to control.
Their lifestyle is a conscious choice. A recognition that life cannot be tamed into patterns.
Rather than opposing this unpredictability, they live with it in totality. Fear does not disappear in such spaces. It hangs in the flutter of the leaves. In the uncertainty of the weather. In the fragility of their reliance on the land. The tribes do not build great barriers against terror. They learn to become accustomed to it. This acquaintance breaks its tyranny.
Fear is a friend, not a dictator.
Contemporary life, on the contrary, is designed to avoid pain. All economic, technological, and psychological structures aim to insulate and isolate people from one another. However, this protection generates vulnerability. The further a person gets away from uncertainty, the more paralyzing even minimal disturbances are.
The tribal spirit presents an opposing belief system. It implies that courage does not involve domination. It requires presence. Joy does not come as a result of overcoming suffering but from knowing how to live with it. It is an unspoken truth that the worth of life does not come as a result of acquisition or victory. But it comes from involvement.
Living without fear, therefore, is to give up on the illusion of complete control. It involves a readiness to face existence in its unrefined, crude form. It is necessary not to give in to the temptation to withdraw at the very initial discomfort. Rather, it is an invitation to stay. To observe. And to participate.
Fear helps us expand and explore. It is an indicator of the unexplored territories of the self. To stop at the edge is to live a compromised life. To walk through it is to engage with the depth of life that goes beyond mere superficial scales of success.
Finally, fearlessness is not the elimination of fear. It is a re-orientation.
A change from –
Avoidance to engagement
Calculation to experience
This asks for courage in its truest form.