Courage and Patience - Rishona Chopra and Simar Kaur

Courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear. 

~Nelson Mandela 

Courage is simply conquering your fear despite how much it frightens you. Tell yourself to take the leap when you are too afraid to do something. You will take time to rise to the occasion, but one fine day, you will wake up and tell yourself, 'Today is the day I take the leap'.

Courage can be moral or physical. Feeling pain physically but still doing it is physical courage. However, even if we are physically fearless, our mind is fearful of a lot of things. These are things you don't feel ready for, things that frighten you, and the thought of them happening to you sends chills down your spine, things that haven't perhaps happened but are killing you inside. But at the end of the day, they will happen to you. Feeling that you are not ready to face them will be a part of the challenge, but telling yourself that you are fine and can handle it is the better part. And that is courage. Courage is not thinking that you will do something in the future; it is the ability to slowly get yourself to do it. Telling yourself daily that you are ready and will do it is courage. And then, a day will come when you will soar high in the sky and think about the time you struggled to do the same, and you will be grateful. And that is life. 

Patience is not simply the ability to wait, it’s how we behave while we are waiting.  

~Joyce Meyer 

 

Patience is the biggest virtue one needs to achieve something. It is not the ability to wait but to keep a good attitude while waiting. While working in a team, we require patience; a student involves patience, a teacher, and a doctor in our daily life; patience is one thing that can solve all problems. Doesn't it feel great when somebody listens to you patiently? In the book - Totto-chan, the headmaster patiently understands students and talks and listens to them. The school wouldn't be that unique and extraordinary if he were impatient. Patience can be used in the smallest of things. Imagine you are waiting for a printout for your school project, and the printer isn't working! That is so annoying! You keep getting annoyed, and instead of waiting until the paper comes out, you restart it repeatedly. If you do that, the printer would be annoyed and ultimately stop working or work even slower. On the other hand, if you wait patiently for the paper to come out, it could. Although having patience is annoying, it is necessary as you might get into a fight with someone too! Like you got into a battle with the printer in the above example. Patience is more than a virtue for long lines and slow waiters. Patience is the red carpet upon which God's grace approaches us.

Patience and courage are strongly connected. One needs the courage to be patient. Courage is not just used for overcoming fears but overcoming the challenge of inculcating these values too. Courage is living with patience; courage and patience are bound together, as the will is bound to time. 

One common fear that we all face is losing loved ones. We hate the thought of it happening to us because we don't feel ready; we don't feel like we can handle that kind of sorrow yet. But, everything doesn't happen according to us. You need to be patient to understand that even if we are not ready, someone will leave us forever - that is the inevitable yet frightening part of our lives. We can't control it and don't feel courageous enough to handle it. But the truth is that we will never be ready.

You will have the courage to let them go one day, but you will remember them forever. Instead, you'll be grateful to have had someone like that in your life. Maybe it will take 2 years or 15 years, but you will be ready one day and courageous enough to let them go and not feel guilty about being happy. Because that's simply the way, life works. And you will have the courage to face it one day, even if you don't have it yet. The thought that our loved ones will disappear just scares us because we don't live in the present and think about the future. We are not patient with life; we don't let life unfold its destiny but keep thinking about it. We must be patient in life and, most importantly, to ourselves, too, which takes courage.

Written by Rishona Chopra and Simar Kaur from Gyanshree School, Noida.