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10 years ago
I read quite an interesting story about the actor Brian Blessed, that made me review how I’m currently thinking about things. Maybe it will do the same for you.
Blessed tells the story of how in 1980 he was appearing in a production of Macbeth at the Old Vic. Peter O’Toole was in the title role and had taken a hammering from the critics. One night, Blessed found O’Toole on his knees in his dressing room, crying out in anguish, “destroyed in heart and soul” he was. Blessed intimated to him that perhaps he shouldn’t go on – that the audience were only there to see him make a fool of himself anyway. O’Toole rejected the advice, and went on....
To quote Blessed – “I have never… never… seen courage like that.”
Now here was a man (Blessed) who originated from close to my part of the world. In those days in particular, it was an area where you didn’t have to wait long to see acts of REAL courage… where men put their lives on the line to save stricken colleagues in mining and industrial accidents nearly every month. He would have seen men going to work in horrible and dangerous conditions where they were exposed to health-wrecking noise, fumes, dust, machinery and work practices on a daily basis. He would have seen men horribly disabled and handicapped for life, but being forced to carry on…
And yet he had become so immersed in the world he now inhabited, that he now saw some bloke risking the making of a bit of a pillock of himself in front of others as the pinnacle of human courage.
I think we can all be a bit like this at times. We become almost hypnotically focussed on our own little worlds, and totally blinkered to the wider picture going on outside of our own circles. We tend to lose perspective, and a sense of what’s important and what isn’t. We over-estimate the magnitude of our own problems, and diminish the significance of those experienced by others.
So reading what Brian Blessed had to say, caused me to think about what real courage is all about, and the nature of real problems. And if I’m honest, I’m a complete stranger to both. And perhaps when you think about it, you’ll find that you are too.
After all, for most of us today there is little going on around us that calls for real courage.
Life has become more of an adventure than an adversity.
But having said that there is possibly one iota of plausible terror that needs attention bringing to it, and that is, I will be away from here for about a week. Hopefully you will cope but if you feel it all to be too much of a struggle, please feel free to rummage through my archives on this very blogsite.
And in the meantime, I promise to be back just as soon as I can.
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