Forward, Onward: Make and Do!
As an old soul, I have always admired Winston Churchill. We have precious little in common, of course (I despise bowlers and could never wrap my lips around a cigar), but his spirit was indomitable. In the face of political onslaughts, wartime bombing, and marital strain, he held his ground. Indeed, his modus vivendi revealed itself starkly in the wartime reassurance: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself!”
Taken in the context of 1940s Britain, these words were undeniably ameliorative, buttressing the war-weary public with an iron-clad confidence that England – whatever the cost – would prevail. So it did.
In peacetime, some 60 years later, I often think of Winston’s inspiring words. Rolling through my head like a chronically stuck LP, they both calm and alarm me. The calm is the echo of the leader’s own time – a strange callback to a feeling of strength and relief realized as a result of Winston’s leadership. This is not my reality, though. Mine is a time of peace ruled nonetheless by alarms presaging fear. Like clockwork, fear arrives – the greatest demon I have ever known.
For England, embroiled in WWII, survival was clear enough: Build bunkers, sound air raid sirens, keep people alive. It wasn’t a complicated conceit, even if protection of a vulnerable population was no easy operation.
Survival in the face of fear, though? What does that even mean? I can’t build bunkers to protect myself from torrents of anxiety and panic; they find me wherever I am. And when the emotional and mental fire-bombing from work colleagues, friends, and partners begins, I have precious little to protect me.
When I originally heard Winston’s words, they were palliative – salving wounds opened from terror over many, many years. Quickly, though, the healing stopped and progress reversed course. I realized what Winston knew too well, I’m sure: As an empowered leader, he could build shelters, instruct an army, fire back against the enemy. But he could not neuter the fear that simmered – boiled! – in the face of terror and evil. Maybe, Winston lived his life as anxiety-ridden as I do.
I have wondered after the subtext of Winston’s mighty words. They punctuated a call to arms and action, and while these do not themselves expunge fear from our existence, they give us the hope of change in forward movement – a change that may, god willing, mean the end of insidious fear in a brighter future.
So which is the truer truth – that fear has no salve or that fear is tempered by our action?
A deep, unassailable part of me still leans on hope, and so I choose to take this from the bowler-capped great:
Fear will not abandon us, will not apologize, will not meekly bow its head and shuffle off. It also need not shackle us. Yes, it worms slyly into our internal discourse if we let it, but this is not the end of the story, though – no more than a Nazi victory was the final word in England.
In Winston’s footsteps, then, may I greet the next day and the next and the next, reminding myself that I am stepping into a future of possibility. Forward, onward, make and do!
In my wake, may I leave fear at yesterday’s fire-bombed doorstep.
