I look at a blank sheet of notebook and listen to the creak of ballpoint pens in class. I am supposed to write an essay about courage but don't know how to begin.
Fragmentary episodes from books about the Second World War float out of my memory, moments from war films flash past but for some reason I don't want to write about them.
It is difficult to write an essay about courage when you are only thirteen years old, because you are not familiar with pain, you have a very vague idea of danger and how to behave in extreme situations. You don't know yet that courage is not having the strength doing hard things, it's doing them when you don't have strength.
At age of seventy-two Henry Matisse, as a sculptor and painter, found himself bedridden. He couldn't anymore paint but he found new possibilities for working by using his scissors. Lying on his back in bed, with a twelve-foot bamboo cane strapped to his wrist, he was able to paste huge swaths of colored paper on his walls and create works of extraordinary sophistication and joy. That was courage! Courage is to continue to create. Courage is to fight the illness and most important courage is to live.
Courage is a choice and always One Way Street. Isn' it?
