Just a short musing.
Something happened in my personal life last week that left me feeling – as my husband aptly supplied for me – discouraged. So I was contemplating the word in the shower, and it struck me that the opposite of discourage is encourage and both of them have the root word courage, which is TOTALLY OBVIOUS RIGHT but also on the other hand, I’m not sure I’d concretely connected the ideas before.
When I’m feeling discouraged, I’m feeling dis-couraged. De-couraged. My courage has been dissed away. The state of discouragement is, by definition, a state of little courage – a state, then of fear.
I’m trying my best not, as the classic ‘Drive’ by Incubus notes, to let fear be the one behind the wheel so often. (“[W]hen I drive myself my light is found”.) Which means having courage. Which means not giving in to discouragement.
I guess this is also why I believe it’s so important that we encourage each other – literally, to breathe or inspire courage into each other so that when we’re feeling discouraged, when we’re out of courage on our own, we have someone else there to have our back, to refill our courage tanks, so we can keep moving through this world in a way that sheds fear – because that’s the other thing I believe: that, mostly, fear is the root of evil, and when we can act in faith and courage and hope and love instead, that’s when we see the world transform – which starts with transforming ourselves.
Feeling discouraged is a normal part of life, and it’s not reasonable to assume we can avoid it – or to blame ourselves if we do end up despairing for a while.
But by finding good support networks who can encourage us, and in turn by putting encouragement out there into the world, I think great things can happen.
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