Ernest Hemingway quote of “Courage is grace under pressure” has been a mysterious riddle to a lot of people. To understand and apply this valuable, yet an enigmatic quote in your life, you need to realize what courage and grace mean.
Mark Twain’s quote on courage makes perfect sense, “Courage is not the absence of fear but acting in spite of it.” Courageous people are thus not fearless. They learn to say no to the warning bells that need them to play safe.
Every day that you wake up and start the day, you do so out of courage. You just have been doing it for so long that it’s out of habit. Facing an unknown day with the hope that everything will turn out alright takes courage.
There are other visible signs of courage like saving a drowning child or addressing a public gathering for the first time. Though the two are different scenarios,there’s a similar force behind them. The force is so strong that it breaks the barriers of common sense. That force is called grace.
You cannot be courageous without grace. Grace cancels out the effects of fear. It turns around the adrenaline energy from flight to fight, and it does so by annulling the logic thinking momentarily. When you’re courageous, the only thing you can think of is your next action.
Acting out of courage means you are defying the warning bells, the negative thoughts, and logic that could lead to cowardice. By being graceful and natural, you’ll not bow your head later on in shame and regret when the opportunity to master courage passes. Grace under pressure thus helps you maintain your composure and choose what is best for yourself and humanity at an instant.
It is a common act to initiate courage having discovered the grace available that you operate but it’s difficult if not possible to influence grace because it is given by divine by the natural course.
Many times human pursuits communicate deliberate troubles. When grace speaks though in silence, without harshness, the inevitable emerges and silence the ugly trend. The ability to forge ahead without fear has been identified as a reliance on a force that keep on activated as it progresses.
Olatunji is President, Tabitha New Life Foundation
