The willingness to show up changes us. It makes us a little braver each time. -Brene Brown
Showing up holds simple meaning. There’s little complexity to it. No one mistakes a person’s intent when they show up. That person is there for a reason, on purpose. Maybe without most of the answers, but that’s not the point. Showing up defines us.
:: a person who wakes up :: a person who doesn’t quit :: a person unwilling to accept probably not :: a person who sees past difficulty
Bravery is little more than standing when circumstance demands you sit. There’s little strength to it. The bravest of people don’t feel brave, maybe foolish. You know a brave man when you see him. He’s probably more bent by life’s weight than others who sit. Bravery names you.
There comes a time when you wake up enough to stars colliding, the sky lightening enough and betting the farm turns value on its head to actually making a lick of sense. We all come to this moment at least once in life when what we dream of makes just enough sense to jump. In that burning moment, we either do or we dam it shut, excused from sensibility and safety.
Why should it make sense?
Take a look at all things too big. That’s just what those things were before they awed onlookers, too big – a novel, painting, building, poem, sculpture, song - some dreamer pulled down the sky and made what was seen. After everyone knows them brave and consistent.
I’d be more willing to say that showing up and bravery are of so much more importance than the result of what you can see. For what you can see, is the historical telling of someone unwilling to let a dream die.
Now you must ask yourself why dreams are so important that we should not let them die.
Dreams – what we wish to do in life and hope to find true – sprout from the core of who we are and can become. I believe God gives dreams and we awake to them as we live the life given us. We all have dreams, hopes and aspirations. They belong to those made brave by showing up.
For me, the dream was to communicate life and faith and their often times strained interaction through story; to write books and author ideas. The book I just finished, my first, is an exact product of the simplicity of showing up day after day.
I hope to continue the discipline and brave abandon of just showing up. I’d invite you to join me being brave in going after our dreams. Wake to something good forgotten, dismissed in simplicity and just begin to show up.