There has been a lot of talk about courage since Caitlyn Jenner came out. What is “real” courage, what isn’t. Who gets to define it, who doesn’t. Who’s a good role model and who isn’t.

I like that. I like that there’s a lot of talk about it. Debate is good. What I don’t like is all of the personal insults being thrown around by both sides of the debate.

But debate is good.

I think, perhaps, that we confuse courage and grace. We often say that people who are fighting cancer have courage–which may or may not be true–when they are actually displaying grace.

One of the standard measures for courage includes brawn: a soldier, a firefighter. Not all courage, though, requires muscles, and to say that one thing is courageous does not set in stone  a single definition of courage.

Courage consists of going beyond fear. Not being unafraid, but looking it in the eye and plowing through it.  Fear is a line that divides us from where we are *here* to where we could be *there.*

It’s a big, fat, scary line, but it is just a line.  And courage merely a step that crosses over that line.

Just a step. One single step.

Very few things are black and white. In fact, even “black and white” isn’t black and white. Colors exist on a spectrum. Colors aren’t binary.  But somehow we’ve become convinced that things are absolute: either something is or it isn’t.

But because of this binary thinking, we often assume an unspoken part of a statement that may not have even been intended in the first place.

And we all know what ass-u-me does.

A perfect example is “Black lives matter.” By saying “black lives matter,” no one (to my knowledge) is implying “…and no other lives matter.” They’re saying that, despite current circumstances where black men and women are being killed at astronomically high rates, sometimes by persons of authority, black lives do, in fact, matter.

It is not diminishing “all other lives” by stating “black lives matter.” It is not saying “black lives are the only lives that matter.”

If there’s any binary there, if there’s any opposition there, it stands in opposition to the death rate, to the violence. NOT in opposition to other lives.

You may or may not think that what Jenner did was courageous, or that she deserves to be called a role model.  But in a society that has such a huge rate of bullying and suicide and violence targeted at ALL people who are different, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans people in particular, publicly stepping up and identifying herself as someone who is part of that population, making herself known and possibly a target of potential violence and bullying, is, at the VERY least, just a little bit courageous.

Yes, courage is most certainly displayed when soldiers hold a front, when firefighters go into the blaze, when police officers save lives. But it’s also displayed in small, often unnoticed ways that rarely get mentioned and never, ever get fanfare.

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