“Everyone is the other, and no one is himself.”
— Heidegger in Being and Time
There is a kind of courage that has nothing to do with hormones.
The usual kind of courage is doing something scary, like jumping from a high place, fighting someone who might beat you, or standing in front of a crowd and saying what you think. This kind of courage is partly connected to our biology. Some people are naturally more willing to take risks than others.
But there is another kind of courage. It is not about facing danger. It is about the way we see life.
I would call it the courage to exist.
Once, a meditation teacher was trying to teach me how to meditate, but he wasn’t getting very far. He told me that he often said this to his students:
“The highest level of control is being able to stay calm even if you are buried alive in a coffin. You should be able to face death peacefully, not like someone who has lost all hope.”
I told him I thought he was looking at it the wrong way.
I said, “You should tell them this instead: You are not really in control of yourself. Your body still reacts in ways you have learned over time. The goal is not to learn how to stay calm when you are buried alive. The goal is to become the owner of yourself. And if you really are in control of yourself, one sign might be that you can even stay calm in a situation like that.”
He thanked me and said he would use my explanation from then on.
But I didn’t tell him the rest of my thoughts.
I knew his students might turn this idea into another exercise. They would treat self-control like going to the gym. They would see it as another skill to practice to improve their lives.
But the truth is, you cannot really understand yourself if you don’t change the way you see life.
We are taught to see ourselves like machines made for special purposes.
Imagine that you see yourself as an off-road vehicle. You believe you are good at driving over rocks, mud, and rough roads. You accept that you may not be the fastest car on a racing track.
Now imagine that you see yourself as a racing car. You believe you are made to go fast and win races. You accept that even a small hole in the road might stop you.
We do the same thing with our personalities.
Someone might say, “I’m just not the kind of person who can be alone.”
Another person might say, “I’m not good at dealing with emotions,” or “I need to be around people all the time.”
These statements may sound like self-knowledge, but they can also become limits.
We create an image of who we are, and then we try to live inside that image. We begin to believe that some experiences are right for us, while others are not.
We start to see life as a huge place, but we believe that only a small part of it belongs to us.
The courage to exist means seeing things differently. It means understanding that life is much bigger than the small picture we have created of ourselves.
It means being open to different experiences, even when they are difficult or unfamiliar.
You don’t need to know what tomorrow will bring
Heidegger’s ideas also invite us to think about time and the future.
We often spend our days worrying about what might happen.
What if we fail? What if someone leaves us? What if we lose everything we have worked for?
We want to know that we will be okay before we take the next step.
But life never gives us complete certainty.
There will always be things we cannot control, people we cannot keep forever, and experiences we cannot fully prepare for.
The courage to exist does not mean believing that nothing can hurt us.
It means understanding that we do not have to know everything about tomorrow before we allow ourselves to live today.
We can love without knowing how long the relationship will last. We can try without knowing whether we will succeed. We can begin again without knowing exactly where the road will take us.
We do not need to become perfect before we deserve to live.
And we do not need to remove every fear before we can move forward.
Perhaps becoming the owner of ourselves means learning to live without demanding that everything happen according to our plans.
It means accepting that life is uncertain, that we are changing, and that we will never have complete control over everything that happens to us.
The courage to exist is the courage to live without needing life to be perfect first.
And perhaps, in the end, that is what it means to become more fully ourselves: not to control every feeling, not to escape every difficulty, and not to become someone who can never be hurt, but to remain open to life even when it surprises us.
We are here for a limited time.
We may never understand everything. We may never become exactly who we imagined we would be.
But we can still choose how we meet the life we have been given.
And that choice begins now.
Dedicated with respect and appreciation to Ali Barfar and Dr. Shiri, whose names I wish to place beside this reflection on being, self-understanding, and the courage to live.