Guest Blog on Passioneering Courage, Alyson Mead, Best-Selling Author
Each month, we are thrilled and grateful to share a guest blog by a Passioneer on that month’s theme. May is the month of Courage, and we a featuring a guest blog by best-selling author Alyson Mead (contact details below). Thanks Alyson and Happy Passioneering! If you or someone you know would like to share their story and/or guest blog, please let us via our 
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Passioneering Courage
By Alyson Mead
Sometimes, you can’t plan it any better. I had started writing this guest blog when my overworked mind gave out. Why had I volunteered to do this in the first place? What did I know about a huge and lofty subject like courage?
For the first day, I stared at the computer screen. Then I was saved by the beginnings of a cold. I’m not an avoider by nature, so my behavior puzzled. What did I fear might happen if I actually wrote this?
On the fourth day, it hit me. I was afraid of nothing; I was afraid of everything. Crap.
I looked up the word courage in the dictionary: ” The state or quality of mind or spirit that enables one to face danger, fear, or vicissitudes with self-possession, confidence, and resolution; bravery.”
I wrote a few sentences, erased them, began again. After two hours, I wondered if my brain had evaporated. The last time I checked, I made my living as a writer.
A quick walk around the block produced little more than an accelerated heart rate. Some sitting meditation revealed the usual suspects: Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, the Dalai Lama. Surely these folks knew what it was to face danger with self-possession. But what was the common denominator?
I read up on their early lives — struggle, leadership skills and great finesse with words. Certainly, they could communicate their ideas to large groups. In fact, more than a few of them were ready to die for these ideas.
My temples felt like they were going to burst when my cell rang. It was my grandmother. We have an old-fashioned correspondence by letter, and rarely speak by phone.
“Hi, dear. It’s Gram.”
“Hey, Gram.”
“What are you up to? It’s raining here.”
“I’m trying to write a piece on courage.”
“A dirge? That’s too bad. Did someone die?”
“No, it’s on courage.”
“There’s a joke about that — Dutch courage.”
I laughed. “Gram, I can’t write about alcoholism.”
“No, it’s from history. When the bubonic plague hit England, the Dutch were the only ones who would deliver supplies to the people there.”
“Wow.”
“They did want extra rum for their services, but …”
“All right, Gram. I should go. But thanks.”
“I’m sure you’ll get it done, dear.” That made one of us.
When I hung up, it hit me. Of course there’s courage in delivering supplies to sick people (rum notwithstanding), or standing up for your beliefs. But that’s not the whole picture. Courage isn’t confined to a grand gesture or historic moment. It lives in all the smaller ones that make them possible.
Gandhi wouldn’t have been able to do his work without the farmers that sustained him, or the weavers making his clothing. The Dalai Lama wouldn’t be half as effective if there were no airplane pilots, book publishers or translators.
Similarly, it’s the way we get through each day with some sort of crooked grace that starts to get at the idea of courage. It’s the process of doing what we adore that encourages the rest to fall into place. It’s in the moments we allow the strange and humbling events around us to blossom into being – even if that is a 92-year old woman pointing out the seemingly obvious.
Alyson Mead is the bestselling author of Wake Up to Your Stories and Wake Up to Your Weight Loss. Her fiction, essays and articles have appeared in over thirty publications, and she has received the Columbine Award for Screenwriting, the Roy W. Dean Filmmaking Grant and awards from Writer’s Digest and USA Book News. Her next book, Signs Point to Yes, chronicles her time working as a phone psychic while
