Life Beyond Measure by Sidney Poitier

Author:Sidney Poitier
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-fiction, Biography
ISBN: 9780061737251
Publisher: HarperOne
Published: 2008-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

thirteenth letter

BRAVERY AND COWARDICE

Hello, Ayele, my dear. I hope that you’ll continue with me as I recall scenes from my life that you have heard before, but perhaps might shed light on subjects of our ongoing conversation about the ways we may live in this world bravely—in spite of our fears, in spite of our demons.

Let me say at the top that there were moments in my young life when cowardice called the shots more often than self-respect should have allowed. Apparently the forces of nature had deemed me too young to be trusted with knowledge they believed was far beyond my years. In their view, I had not yet learned all there was to know about a masterfully cunning, unseen culprit we’ve been discussing, named fear, who quietly roams the landscape far and wide in search of the vulnerable to terrorize and plunder.

Bravery, meanwhile, repeatedly presented itself to me in the form of key survival responses: the endurance of courage under stress; one’s capacity to mark one’s territory, and then to hold one’s ground as best one can—doing so whenever fear and its sidekicks come stampeding into one’s life without permission. All of which eventually focused my thoughts and set me to wondering whether bravery, courage, and heroism would have meaning in the total absence of cowardice, timidity, fear, doubt, and desperation. How significant is the existence of one in the absence of the other? Might they not all be threads of differing energies, differing colors, intricately and, it seems, mysteriously woven into the fabric of life by nature herself? Threads whose collective presence is viewed as having provided immeasurable resilience and unfathomable complexities to the ongoing process of human existence. Threads on which, some believe, life, death, survival, and extinction hinge.

So potent is this push and pull in us that though younger brazen acts fade into memory, even in recent days I still find myself high up on a building rooftop, fraught with the fear of heights, stepping compulsively toward the edge, where, for primal reasons, I dare myself to put my nose far out to where I can look down and see the street far below, all the while bending and holding my haunches counterbalanced at a safe distance from peril. Yes, even at eighty years old, I am compelled to that drama. It definitely gets the heart pumping!

Not understanding this drive in my younger life, I couldn’t put my actions into the greater context of a survival struggle that is constantly under way. It’s a search for balance between soaring high and falling low, between good and evil—hope and despair—a win and a loss. I hadn’t yet learned that all the accompanying thrills—even vanity, ego, and self-aggrandizement—have a value, and are therefore entitled to reasonable space in which to express their right to exist. Who knows? Maybe a single thread will be all one needs to hold on to one’s self-worth, one’s knowledge of being purely and simply alive.

In specific terms, there were foolish things that

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