“Courage – the will to risk. The acceptance of insecurity. A wise will must at times and places know how to dare, assuming responsibility, and risk. You must have the courage to err.”
~ Roberto Assagioli

Reading this quote today on the Synthesis Centre San Francisco’s feed, I felt, and followed, the impulse to hold these words in awareness, and contemplate their meaning. Their meaning for my own path through this life, and for those I share that gift of life with.

This quality we commonly call courage rises from our depths, and descends from our highest being, joining at the centre, our awareness. To truly risk in a conscious, aware sense – and I’m talking about frisk born of ill-informed impulses, we might go so far as to categorise that experience as bordering on illness if self-awareness isn’t well-developed – is to risk responsibly. Responsible for the personal, inner landscape of Psyche, of Soul, and how that becomes through our words and actions in the outer, public world.

To risk responsibly means a willingness to accept the part we play in whatever follows. We discover joy and fulfilment, pain and suffering, in that stepping up to life. It’s no mean feat, this gift of Being. To be, and be aware of that psychological process, means to relate, inwardly and outwardly. The what and how of our the quality of public relations is a function of the what and how of relating to ourselves, to our root needs as unique individuals, for food, shelter, connection with like-minded others; for love. That process of relating inwardly means listening inwardly.

When we trust ourselves to listen inwardly, and that assumes we’ve been listened to as an experience, then we can perhaps hear that quiet, inner voice. To trust is to love, a function the Romans and Greeks mythically imagined as Venus-Aphrodite, the goddess of love, the goddess of relationship. Those old stories contain many millennia worth of hard-earned cultural knowledge, much of which modern civilisation casts off as irrelevant, antiquated, passe. Those old stories are steeped in wisdom, if only we have the ears to listen.

Sounds pretty grand, right? Well, we have a lifetime (at least) to explore that inner process, and how that process works ‘out there’ in the world of shared reality. Lets listen to ourselves more, so that we can listen to others more clearly.