Creativity and Health
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Stress and Illness
Courage
In this website, creative "self assets"
are described as those attributes by which we're able to stand up to "stress forces" like fear
and anger
, and thereby protect ourselves from stress. Courage serves as an excellent example of just such an "asset".
Courage - from the French word for heart, "cœur" - is vital in defending our own, personal creativity - and creative self - from domination by stress
, specifically by fear
.
One clearly stressed culture that is distant enough to observe with a degree of detachment was that of Ancient Sparta. Ancient Spartans were brought up to please their “superiors” and make them proud. As youths, the men had to pay their cultural dues and prove their “virtue”... by vowing to prey on the Helots, a people singled out for systematic persecution.
Spartans grew up to assume that “manliness” meant the willingness to spill Helot blood. But in Sparta, army recruits refused to stand up to brutes like excessive pride, coldness of heart, and being cruel. To pledge to courage true - and remain as true, creative human beings
- we need to rearm ourselves with one rule: the heart’s.
*
Fighting for all
of us even in the face of death threats, Martin Luther King advised us, “Courage faces fear and thereby masters it.”
Likewise, at the Christmas truce, the heart asked for the soldiers to be human, see their “enemies” as brothers, and defy the order to keep shooting.
To build true justice, we must see conventions and rules as sometimes foolish... unless they take their cue from the ultimate lawmaker and standard bearer bar none: the heart
(the traditional collective term for all our creative "self assets", precisely like courage).
The heart rules not through pride and shame, nor by compelling everyone to be the same. Neither does it drain our creativity, or dominate.
Authority figures relying on fear etc.
for their "power" might be paraded as “authority”, but our heart is
authority, as channelled through a few C’s like courage - see creative "self assets".
It's through the likes of courage - and not fear etc.
- that we'll make true progress, both as individuals and as a species.