Action and Endurance

Greetings patient reader.
Apologies for being absent the past week; I wish I had any excuses but I don't want to convince you that I was actually doing anything worthwhile and make this absence justified.

However, life did get a bit overwhelming and this week I cried about 5 times. Thrice in one day itself.
So you can imagine, it hasn't been all peachy goodness. I am better now, more centered at least and able to continue writing to you and hoping that you can still find it in you to read this.

Let's start with the good things simply because they are shorter in terms of what happened and easier to explain. I started playing Badminton after a long time of not doing much physical exercise and I bought a new crop top (which I haven't ever bought before because I am way too self-conscious of how I would look in it), and both of these things made me feel better about myself. I embraced how I look much more kindly than I used to before and actually did things that would get me sweating and moving instead of just walking alone and wasting brain space over nothing. These were the good things this week.

Now, for the bad and why I am choosing to write "Action and Endurance" as my title.
As much as I've lived, all good 23 years of my life, I have seen two kinds of courage. The first kind is the one that is action-based i.e. when something goes wrong, that person will do something about it and try to change the current of the situation.
The second kind is the endurance-based courage i.e. this person can go through hell and back, have all sorts of bad luck thrown at them and they'll still bounce back. They may or may not try to change their situation, but you can trust that they will be resilient throughout the whole thing and come back out of it.

I personally think that I fall into the second category. I'm the kind of person who is more likely to take a hit and still be standing instead of just punching back. If you have seen Rocky Series, you'll remember in the one with Ivan Drago in it. The last fight scene of the film, Rocky has a few shots where he is just taking punch after punch from Drago and tiring Drago out. That kind of courage to keep standing hit after hit, that is what I feel I have the most of in terms of courage in situations. I may not always stand up in situations but I know I'm always there when all the mess is done and it's time to rebuild.

There are a few people I know that possess the action kind of courage, who aren't afraid to go to any lengths and breadths to do what's right. I have a couple of my friends who are very very dear to me and when I'm the one who's enduring, they're the ones who scream and shout at the things that have wronged me and stand by me, unmoved. I may crumble under the weight of things that are happening around me but I am constantly inspired by how fearlessly they take on things and make it their bitch! (excuse my language.)

Neither of these versions of courage is any better than the other. Both have their own set of consequences, heartaches, and issues that come with them. Even not having the courage to take on life is alright because I understand that not all of us have the same definition of courage. Seeing the day after a crisis, picking up a new sport, doing your hair differently, listening to something that popular culture hates but you love, having your own opinion and standing by it, all to me, are small acts of courage we do every day. Courage isn't the easiest thing to come to everyone and not everyone expresses it similarly. The only thing I try to make sure with the people around me is that I don't let these small gestures of courage go unnoticed. As much as I can, I will try to recognize the effort and guts that you took to do a certain thing or say a certain thing, in a situation or place that made you uncomfortable.


These are observations that have been formed with time, loss and a lot of introspection so I can only speak for myself here and not others but I do want you to that one thing that I usually do with the both of us at the end of the post.

You can pick either of these:

1) Recognize someone's courage and let them know that you see it and give it its due value.

2) Recollect to yourself the last time you did something which was out of your comfort zone and write about the process. How did you gather the courage to do it, how did you endure the situation and still stood strong? Remember, it doesn't have to be outright or explicit acts of bravery, it can be anything that you faced and came out of.




As always, thank you so much for being patient with me and reading all of this. It means more than this blog post can express.



- Shreeparna.