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Courage And Heroes
By peace | April 17, 2007
The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast you. Success has nothing to do with what you gain in life or accomplish for yourself. It’s what you do for others. You can make a lasting contribution to others and to life itself. You can’t take it with you, but you can leave a lot behind.
“For Valour.” These are the words inscribed on the highest award it is possible for soldier of the British Empire to win — the Victoria Cross. The man who earns it has given evidence of the highest courage; he has risked his life for something he considered worth more than anything personal — perhaps the life of a comrade, perhaps the welfare of his regiment, or even the success of the battle.
No woman has ever won the Victorian Cross. It is only intended for soldiers, but it does not follow that soldiers, or even men, have the monopoly of courage. Women may not have the chance of doing heroic deeds that bring such great honour to the doer, but they do nevertheless as many acts of valour as men do and sometimes continue to carry on a task calling for great courage for years at a time, whereas a soldier’s Victorial Cross can be won in a few minutes.
There are two minds of courage, and women will be the first to agree that in the kind that calls for sudden decisions and desperate undertakings they are less richly endowed than their menfolk. They flinch from the thought of deliberately doing something that will almost certainly lead to pain or death; and they are not as a rule inspired by the thought of winning glory. But in the other sort of courage — that which enables them to go on doing a difficult job with no encouragement and very little success, they are by far richer. No one would think of bestowing any medal on the wife of the man of slender means, who runs her house and brings up her children on an incredibly small sum of money, making do and bearing up through all the little trials and worries that beset a mother, yet surely courage is needed to enable a woman to do a job like that well! And there are women who have borne the pain of dreadful diseases for years and uncomplaining continued with their household duties; there are others who have found out too late that the man whom they have married is not what they thought him, is a wife-beater, or a gambler, or a drunkard, and yet they have stuck to their job as a wife, and nobody has known or understood what courage that entailed.
It is comparatively easy to be brave when the eyes of the world are upon us and the plaudits of our friends will echo in our ears if we accomplish a daring deed. But to do something brave that no one will ever know about, and to go on doing it when we are tired and disillusioned and disappointed calls for a much greater effort and is consequently a much nobler act.
“Some are born great; some achieve greatness; some are made great.” This is what Shakespeare wrote in one of his plays. Everybody wants to become great. Why great? The answer itself is obvious because the greatness has its own rewards, name and fame, ovation and applause, red carpeted welcome and so on. Everybody aspires to be great and there is practically no field where one cannot become great also, for example, fire fighters and law enforcement officers, or even a cook. How great? There is a degree and shades of greatness as there are shades in colours. In every field there is greatness and the one in a particular field cannot be equated with the other in a different field. So each one in his specialized field has got his standard or ideal of greatness.
But in all these, one thing is common that greatness cannot be achieved so easily. It is not made to measure and it is true also that it is not always the deserving that becomes great. To achieve greatness, a lot of perspiration is needed. Hero-worship is one of the main springs of enthusiasm in life. It is a means by which a love of adventure can be passed on from one generation to another, thereby keeping alive the vital force of civilisation. Idolizing a character in history or a great man known only by repute and not by personal acquaintence is a kind of hero-worship which has done much to inspire young people to brave deeds and to lives of adventure and service.
He could have added fortune to fame, but caring for neither, he found happiness in being helpful to the world. ~ Epitaph on the grave of George Washington Carver
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