THE DIGNITY OF DARING

by Gregg Levoy

The first time I met David Roche, my face froze involuntarily into a blank stare, a chink in decorum with which he undoubtedly has a weary familiarity.
David has a striking facial disfigurement, and as we stood at the front door of my house, where he and his wife Marlena had come to participate in a workshop on public speaking, officiated by an old friend of mine, it took me an egregiously long moment before I recovered from my fumble and was able to proceed with the usual social amenities of shaking hands, introducing myself, and ushering them in.

While a small, portable stage and video camera were being set up in the living room, lights and microphone arranged, and chairs pulled in from the kitchen, I marvelled that he was here at all. I couldn’t help noticing that his wife was beautiful; a dancer’s bearing and stratospheric cheekbones.

My friend, Lee, introduced the evening by saying that while it is common belief that the most prominent fear people have is that of dying, in fact it has been shown that the #1 fear is of public speaking; the #2 fear, he said, is that of dying while public speaking. So when David volunteered to go first, I was doubly astonished, and imagined a light sweat breaking out on a roomful of foreheads.

I adopted a suportive smile as he loped onto the stage, grabbed the microphone, took a deep breath, and without missing a beat, said, “I was born with a face that’s a gift from God. Not the kind of gift you rip open exclaiming, ‘How exquisite. How did you know?’ More like, “Oh, you shouldn’t have.”

There was a moment of lunar silence in the room, and then my fictive smile broke into an unexpected laugh made up of equal parts surprise and relief, and I flicked a sideways glance at the others to gauge my reaction. It was unanimous.

David’s gift is that his shadow is on the outside and he has no choice but to deal openly with it. He cannot pretend, as so many of us do, that it doesn’t exist. And if people are going to stare----which they do everywhere he goes----he figured he might as well make the most of it. His gift, his wound, has thus become his calling: “to remind people of what they already know,” he said. “That it’s OK to be flawed.”

His calling has also necessitated that, as Lee puts it, David “talk his walk,” that he be willing to devote himself to the risk-taking that must be undertaken if a calling is to be affirmed. Author Gail Sheehy calls this “the master quality of pathfinding,” of confronting the challenges of life creatively. David takes risks every time he steps up onto a stage, which he does for a living! A public speaker, entertainer and standup comic, he does one-man shows at theaters and clubs, and keynote speaking for national medical conventions attended by 500 people.

“The best works,” said French author and architect Fernand Pouillon, “are those at the limits of life. They stand out among a thousand others when they prompt the remark: ‘What courage that must have taken!’ “


THE VELVET CAGE

Courage, of course, like risk, is absolutely relative. What is courageous to one person may be fainthearted to another. Risk is whatever scares you.

The courage it takes David to talk his walk, flaws and all, is the same courage it takes any of us who look straight into the dark gate of whatever is unknown to us and know that our fate lies in there, that our lives won’t be complete and won’t make sense until we go through. In doing so, we exercise the courage to leave behind what we have for what we don’t, what we are for what we could be, and to take on challenges compared to which even depression and torpor might seem preferable. It is the courage to step past the point of no return, to acknowledge that all our mightiest refusals are mere resistance, and that, as philosopher Ernest Becker once said, “beyond a given point we are not helped by more knowing, but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way.”

What David risks in climbing up on stage is what we all risk when we honor the demands of a calling: that it will call us beyond the limits we’ve set for ourselves; toward the primitive fears of rejection and failure that are attached, like barnacles on a rock, to the idea of risk; toward the shadow sides of ourselves that we try to hide even from ourselves----the timidity and indecisiveness, the fear of change, the fear of being a beginner. We love to quote Goethe who said that “whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” But we forget that he also said, “To put your ideas into action is the most difficult thing in the world.”

But if we do not, we risk building for ourselves velvet cages: the money’s good, the security comforting, the surroundings familiar----but we become only recreational users of our passion and creativity.

The very act of risk-taking, in fact, sets up an antagonism with the established order of things. In creating lives based on our callings, we may have to break the rules, disappoint people, part ways with colleagues and friends, re-fashion our marriage vows, head against the prevailing winds. Jesus promised those who would follow him only three things, says writer Marty Babcock: “That they would be absurdly happy, entirely fearless, and always in trouble.”

Risk-taking should not become a theology, however. Sometimes, it is merely a disguised form of escape, or a kind of repetition-compulsion in itself, a blind urge to prove our wills superior, to refuse to be scared, to idolize the river gods who personify eternal change. Sometimes hanging in there, or exercising creativity within the status quo, is the better part of valor.

What must be established is whether a particular status quo in your life exists as a monument to the fear of change, or, conversely, whether risk-taking is a function of sheer restlessness and ennui. Nothing is inherently wrong with either, but if you’re taking chances and making changes just for the sake of not standing still, your actions may be more about running away from something than moving toward something. Motion is not necessarily progress any more than noise is necessarily music.


PAYING HOMAGE TO PAN

In myths and folktales, those places beyond the cozy confines of the village are typically populated with figures of dread and danger----ogres, dragons, half-men, shapeshifters. One of the most familiar of these is Pan, the cloven-hoofed, classical god of forests. We ought to approach risk with the deference and forethought with which we would approach Pan, who, appropriately, instills panic in anyone who blunders into his domain. To those, however, who dedicate their first fruits to him, who respect the role that the unknown and unseen have in any undertaking, he is far more benign, even beneficent.

Intelligent risk-taking means giving a tip of the hat to Pan before stepping foot in his forests. It means entering with no illusions; knowing that your endeavors will always be attended by the conflict between the voices of despair and faith, no and yes, security and passion.

When I was a child, I loved generating a stomach-dropping arc on the swing in my backyard, going high enough in both directions that the chain slackened momentarily, and then letting go of the swing at the forward end of this giddy parabola and becoming airborne, floating, flying out over the world, and landing in the sandbox. I felt this sensation in my throat, my solar-plexus and my groin simultaneously, and I still do whenever I must let go of what is familiar and fly out over the unknown. Letting go demands what the writer Margaret Atwood calls “an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.”

I have great faith in starting small with risks, though, starting in your own backyard. “Where you are, and one step,” as David Roche puts it. No rule says you have to tackle a call in one jump. Nor does a call have a single right answer. A call asks us to create a response, and even a diminutive one is still saying yes. The point is to move toward it, however humbly, to take small risks and record your impressions, keep field notes.

Small risks, unfortunately, are always in danger of staying small, and practice can easily devolve into procrastination. There is no end to the rehearsals we can make, the questions we can pose, the experts we can consult, and the classes we can take. At some point, we have to leap. “You cannot cross a chasm in two small jumps,” the British statesman David Lloyd George once said.

Fear, of course, is the great boogeyman of risk-taking, and has been since human life first winked on. In myth and literature, for instance, whenever dragons appear, no matter what names they go by, they are all fear, and we encounter them at every stage of the quest: every threshold, every turning point, every crossroad. And fear, like a dragon, is determined to hang on to life. Fear may be a signal that you’re close to something vital and that your call is worthy of you, but even so, taking risks will often make you feel like you’re building a house of cards while fate holds its breath.

Fortunately, you do not have to be fearless to take risks. You don’t have to have all your proverbial ducks lined up, or even to feel good. These are not prerequisites. Yet most of us will still approach risk with the usual baggage of emotional anxieties about failure, rejection and humiliation. Bilbo Baggins expressed the common approach toward fear and risk neatly at the start of The Hobbit, and at the beginning of his own epic journey: “We’re just plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things. Make you late for dinner. I can’t think what anybody sees in them.”

Nonetheless, “If we wait until our hands stop shaking,” says actress Naomi Newman, “we will never open the door,” and we must. We may not cease being fearful, but we can cease to let fear control us. Furthermore, she says, since there’s fear and suffering in life whether or not we take risks, we might as well suffer in the service or our dreams. “Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over again to annihilation,” wrote philsopher and psychotherapist Karlfried Graf Durkheim, “can that which is indestructible arise within us. In this lies the dignity of daring. We must have the courage to face life, to encounter all that is most perilous in the world.”


LEAVING THE BIRDCAGE

In attempting to take our necessary risks, however, we come up against a number of institutions----family, education, government, law, even organized religion----that often school us in continuity rather than change. Even evolution has hardwired us to avoid risks, to seek security, to transform novelty quickly into habit, to jump at the slightest sound. In a manner of speaking, we all have our fight-or-flight buttons stuck in the “on” position. Yet evolution is also constantly creating. “Whatever there be of progress in life,” Henry Miller once wrote, “comes not through adaptation, but through daring. The whole logic of the universe is contained in daring, in creating from the flimsiest, slenderest support.”

Actually, we are creatures of both initiative and caution. Human life is, in some sense, the chronicle of a land animal caught between its desire to sprout wings and fly, and to retrace its steps back into the sea. Whichever impulse you respond to, your life follows suit.

If there are damages inherent in risk, though, there is also recompense. When you stand before a group and speak, though you may lose composure, you may also discover that you are, after all, someone who is capable of public speaking. If you’re panic-stricken in the face of conflict between you and others, and yet rise to an occasion and confront someone, you may lose a few nights’ sleep, but you may also lose your terror of it, and may even find that your very acuteness around conflict makes you the best sort of negotiator----that your wound is, like David’s, your gift. If you’re afraid to test your wares in the marketplace, to send your delicate shoots of optimism out into an indifferent world, and if you do it anyway, you risk losing your innocence, but if you sell, you gain confidence that cannot be had in any other way.

And if you discover that, indeed, you can partake of your callings, you can act in accordance with your deepest values and passions, you can have what you so desire, you are then faced with another task: having to revise your beliefs about yourself and the world; what is and is not possible. Not revising theories to fit the facts is not only bad science, but skewed perception.

An old joke in psychoanalytic circles illustrates this need to protect an established self-image against the blessings of growth:

A man goes to a psychiatrist convinced that he is dead. Unable to help his client shake this delusion, the psychiatrist says, “You’ve heard, haven’t you, that dead men don’t bleed?”

“Yes,” the man replies.

The psychiatrist then takes a pin and pokes him in the arm, making him bleed. “What do you say now?” he asks.

“Well, what do you know,” the client says, “dead men do bleed.”

The desire to protect ourselves from change probably does more harm to the flowering of human life and spirit than almost any other choice, but it is imperative to understand something about security: it isn’t secure! Everything about security is contrary to the central fact of life: that life changes. By avoiding risk, we may feel safe and secure----or at least experience a tolerable parody thereof----but we don’t avoid the harangues of our consciences. It’s almost axiomatic that the important risks we don’t take now become the regrets we have later. In fact, one of the scariest---and most useful----things anybody ever said to me was this: “If you’re not failing regularly, you’re living so far below your potential that you’re failing anyway.”


** Excerpted from Callings: Finding and Following An Authentic Life (Random House) by Gregg Levoy.

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