How to behave at the peak of your emotions? How to behave at ease, cheeky and bold? Do not remain nothing, let the train of stories, legends and tales follow you.
The word in Ozhegov's Dictionary of the Russian Language belongs to the category of “obsolete” and has the meaning of “easy-going, cheeky behavior”. If you open the "Comprehensive English-Russian Dictionary", then there the word "courage" is translated as "courage, courage, courage, courage." From French this word is translated in the same way as from English, and is used in phrases that have the following meanings: “cheer up, decide on something and not back down, not be afraid to express your views. It is safe to say that today the word "courage" has returned to our language and has a very wide semantic spectrum: from outdated "swagger" to a state of complete inner freedom, liberation with all semitones and transitions. Let's agree that we will not even touch on marginal options of courage (for example, due to strong drinking or “frostbite”) and pure “banter”.
Indeed, it is boring to live without courage! It's like chewing pasta with a toothless mouth every day. Imagine: you turn on the TV, and there the presenter with a lean face sadly broadcasts about the latest news in the world of pop music. Well, switch the program. Louder, louder the sound - all the same Masha Rasputina sings! There are only six or seven voices like hers all over the world. Yes, only who would have known her, except for a few connoisseurs, if Masha had not chipped off some numbers at each of her concerts! And who cares about how Masha sobbed avidly over a parrot, dead from strain, trying to duplicate her song "I was born in Siberia" … But - virtuoso courage! And TV journalists vying with each other show how she laughs, sitting on Borovoy's lap, and threatens to give birth to a child from him. And the press voluptuously reports that another new boyfriend gives her another new Mercedes, and that in general she is an object of passion for almost the entire strong half of humanity. Interesting!
A talented person without courage at all - nowhere! If you are not followed by a train of shocking legends and tales, then there is a great risk and with the talent to remain a pale moth.
Haydn often conducted in London, and he knew that many Englishmen sometimes go to concerts not so much for the pleasure of listening to music as for tradition. Some London concert-hall goers have developed the habit of falling asleep in their comfy chairs while performing. When Haydn became convinced of this attitude to his music, he decided to take revenge on indifferent listeners. Revenge was witty. Haydn specially wrote a new symphony. At the most critical moment, when part of the audience began to nod off, there was a thunderous beat of a big drum. And every time, as soon as the listeners calmed down and tuned into sleep again, the drummer stepped in, and the sounds of the timpani or drum fell upon them. Since then, this work has been called "Surprise", or "Symphony with Timpani Beats".
The actors are often swaggering, using their skill of reincarnation.
In the studio of one artist, they were arguing about art. Chaliapin, who did not take part in the dispute, suddenly stood up and said:
- I'll show you what art is.
After a while, he quietly left.
… Suddenly the door opened abruptly and Chaliapin, deathly pale, with matted hair, appeared on the threshold. Just one word leaves his lips:
- FIRE!
Panic began, screams of horror were heard … And suddenly the mask of fear and despair left Chaliapin's face. He laughed and said:
- That's what art is!
It is impossible not to recall here the play “Storm” by Vladimir Bill-Belotserkovsky and Faina Ranevskaya in the courageous role of a speculator, the text for which she wrote herself with the permission of the author. She always played in different ways, but the effect after her scene was the same - an ovation, and the audience practically dispersed. "Storm" had a long life on the stage of various theaters, but when staged at the theater. Mossovet chief director Yuri Zavadsky removed the “speculator” from the play. To Ranevskaya's question: "Why?" he said: “You play your role too well, and this makes your speculator almost remembered as the main figure in the performance …”. Ranevskaya suggested: "If it is necessary for the cause, I will play my role worse."
But this, if I may say so, is an individual courage from the cycle “Ostap has suffered”. At the same time, there is often collective courage: by conspiracy or by virtue of its infectiousness. As an example of a possible courage by conspiracy, it is appropriate to mention the intensely exaggerated rumor that such a person as William Shakespeare simply did not exist, and a group of actors from the Globe Theater acted under this name (the texts of the roles were not distributed to the actors at that time, everything was heard, therefore, the actors had to improvise in the course of the action, and those transcripts of the performances that supposedly survived are often very different from each other). It is interesting that here two variants of collective courage over the entire world of spectators are possible: first, a group of actors posing as a nonexistent playwright, courageously overpowering everyone who considers the existence of Shakespeare to be indisputable; the second - a group of people who started a tale about collective acting, swaggering both over the audience and over numerous Shakespearean scholars. Everything is known for certain about Kozma Prutkov, but with Shakespeare there is no complete clarity.
As for the infectiousness of collective courage, this phenomenon is quite common. If a partner or partners in any activity are not averse to participating in such a process, then everything works out without problems. For example, the same Nikita Bogoslovsky describes how, languishing from the heat and idleness in the hall for transit passengers of an airport somewhere in the Azores, he, along with a certain Writer and a certain Art critic, began to swagger over words. The bottom line was that it was necessary to find a word from which, if you divide it in half, you would get a first and last name. Moreover, the name should be real or as close to that, but the surname - how it goes. And the collective courage began: Lev Sha, Mina Ret, Lyuda Edka, Kira Sir, Maxim Alny, Axel Yerator, Arkhip Yelag, Fedya Ratsiya, Inna Skazanie, Olya Garhia, Nika Tin, Liza Blyud, Filya Telist and so on.
Such cases are not uncommon in the theatrical art. If your stage partner unexpectedly made a courageous, interesting move, then you can always not only support him, but also develop him - and then a new text, new coverage of the event can enter the performance as something directorial and even author's. So, for example, in the production of the Theater. Ruben Simonov's “The Devil Woman” based on Prosper Mérimée's novels, the actors who played the Viceroy and his secretary successfully played the surname of Lopez, a silk merchant from Callao Street. Then the TV series “Just Maria” was on and they linked the names of the characters in the play and the series. The audience appreciated this, and the innovation entered the text.
Many more examples can be cited, but we will limit ourselves to one more - from the world of dance. Among those who have tightly linked courage and intelligence is the American Tricia Brown, who started back in the sixties, during the triumph of shocking dance experiments. Take, for example, a special development of the stage space, when dancers, strapped to blocks, move up and down the walls, creating a feeling of a distorted perspective and violation of the laws of physics in the audience. Or her composition "A Play on the Roof", when eleven dancers, sitting on the rooftops of several blocks of Soho (London's district, where restaurants, casinos and other entertainment establishments are concentrated), transmitted semaphore signals to each other, and the audience watched all this from their own, spectator roofs. And what about our famous Petersburg choreographer Boris Eifman, who is called “the new Petipa” and who breaks all creative records?
Earlier, the conversation was about the swagger among the "lyricists". However, even "physicists" are in the habit of swaggering over someone or over something.
For example, Lev Landau, who was generally a very witty person, had a good show of one theoretician who was unloved by everyone because of his arrogance, sending him a telegram that the Nobel Prize Committee asked him to send such and such documents in view of the award of this the Nobel Prize theorist in physics. He lifted his nose even higher and generally stopped greeting his colleagues. The poor fellow did not know that when the Nobel Prize was awarded specifically, nothing was required from the applicants at all.
Academician Yakov Zeldovich found acrostics among some old poetry, which, by coincidence, contained the words “… The fool flickered …” and showed it to everyone, to which the offended physicist Arkady Migdal got himself a monkey and named it after Zeldovich “Yashka”.
The collections "Physicists are joking" and "Physicists continue to joke" have become very famous. If the first was entirely based on translated materials, then the second included domestic pearls of wit and courage. In principle, the beginning of all this was laid by the collection "The Journal of Joking Physics", published for the fiftieth anniversary of Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. This was followed by other collections (how do you like the title of one of the books: “Calculation of stresses in a strapless evening dress”?). Yes, and in foreign scientific publications, sometimes there are large quasi-serious articles written by physicists and designed for physicists, not counting humorous poems, notes and messages. Known are "The Seventeen Commandments of the Dissertation", "Afternoon Remarks on the Nature of the Neutron", "Typology in Scientific Research", "Quantum Theory of Dance" and much, much more. Teachers, especially young ones, also swagger over students. One of the favorite ways is to ask the student a problem that you solve yourself.
For example, a physicist friend of mine told me that at the Moscow Phystech the nimble young “teacher” was put to shame by a student when, in a fit of an examination attack of genius, he solved in an hour the problem (though not completely) that the offender himself had been struggling with for a year. Here, as they say, courage found courage.
What is the courage based on? Like any phenomenon, courage has two sides. One of them is negative, when one person “swaggers” over another. This is due to both its advantage: physical, mental, informational, and internal focus on precisely such a form of action that allows you to stand out from the people around you. Otherwise it is popularly called “show off”, a person “show off”. Sometimes this option looks good (but from the outside) - remember Yan Arlazorov with his famous cycle (“You, man, will be a teapot. And you will be a whistle…”). The second is the positive side, when courage is based on a state of emancipation, inner freedom, associated either with high professionalism, or with a sense of inspiration. “To become free, you need to feel free,” Casanova said in a conversation with Voltaire. But a truly free person will not seek to infringe on the dignity of others. His freedom is aimed at improving himself or at overcoming those difficulties that interfere with this process or the solution of those specific tasks that occupy him. In this regard, we can say that new types of anything - art, science, sports, are a manifestation of this particular kind of courage. Perhaps everything new is the answer to the subconscious question: “Weak?”. And the answer materializes in break dance, windsurfing, freestyle, extreme sports, records, discoveries: “No! I'm not weak!”. But in order to achieve the required emancipation, to get rid of the fetters, it is necessary, we repeat once again, high professionalism, creative enlightenment and the appropriate direction of both thinking and concrete actions. Without all this, courage will show a different, negative side. After all, there are only two ways to be higher than others: the first is to crush the others under yourself, the second is to ascend above them on wings that you have created yourself.
“Life is also a performance,” says Jean-Paul Gaultier, a famous French fashion designer, “we feel the need to play. The performance allows you to dream, helps to get away from the real gray life and gives strong emotions”. Gaultier continues: “We live in a world of habits and traditions. So I try to shock, throw the audience off balance. I'm trying to shake everyone up.” Gaultier is called a "bully" in fashion, a troublemaker, a troublemaker.
American psychologists swagger: the founders of the so-called NLP (neurolinguistic programming) school, Ron Hubbard and Champion Teich, declare their methods a panacea for all human troubles and misfortunes, creating a powerful promotion for themselves. Some of our domestic psychologists practice the same.
Oh, those talents! Providence itself tells them to swagger. Artists, satirists, poets are swaggering … The state of courage is constantly used by professional dancers. They call it “living on the second floor”. That is, higher. Some imagine themselves as a balloon hovering above the ground. A professional dancer, as soon as he puts on a costume appropriate for the dance, automatically enters a state of courage. The great Salvador Dali once spoke in front of students wearing a spacesuit. What is not courage!
If you are not endowed with any special talent, why should you be lost, or what? Don’t worry! There are only a few absolute mediocrities - they still need to be among them. So strain and remember what such talents of yours you buried in the ground and did not erect a monument to them. Each person possesses some gift, which often, like frozen vegetables, lies in the refrigerator of the soul. Unfreeze the bag - and then you will discover this in yourself!
Human life is short, like the life of a fly. So hum so that you can be heard. Or at least speed up so that the dust hurricane sweeps behind you.
In Western psychology, courage is associated with the state of flow, flight, inspiration. In the east - with a state of creative enlightenment, the so-called satori. But in our incarnation, courage differs significantly from both the Eastern and Western understanding. In Russian, the word "courage" has a part that is consonant with the word "rage". And to enter into a rage, as you know, means to fall into a kind of inspired frenzy, exaltation, fraught with risk.
So, let's take a closer look at all three positions. Swinging in a Western way means entering a state of flow at the peak of emotions, into a state of extreme creative activity. This is a special state of consciousness, concentration, flight. There is a feeling that some special force is doing everything for you. The movements are perfected to automatism, the speech is light, pouring in a continuous stream. Many speakers know the "ten minute effect" - during this time you need to talk yourself, and then you are already carried away. One lady, a network marketing leader, walked on stage wearing tiger slippers. The people in the audience were shocked. She herself drew their attention to her slippers. "Do you want me to make tigers out of you?" The effect was amazing. Explaining why she does this, she said: “I show people that I am free from conventions. I am rich and free, and I can afford to do what I want. " People experience such a state at the moment of creative upsurge, public speaking, even in everyday life, for example, selflessly playing with children.
How do I enter the flow state? The Western version includes three points. First, you need to move from a big task to a small one. Second: find your own way, start thinking in an original way, do something differently, get away from stencils. Third: overcome the need for self-control, get rid of it and start working spontaneously. If a balance is reached between skills, abilities and something completely new, then you are fluent in Western courage.
Oriental courage is entering the state of satori, which is the quintessence of Zen Buddhism. The essence of Zen Buddhism is to learn to look at life in a new way, to get rid of stereotypes of perception that prevent a person from being free. Satori is a state of altered consciousness that usually occurs sporadically. It is impossible to be in such a state all the time. What are the signs of satori? First: irrationality, inexplicability. There is a feeling of something otherworldly. As if something controls you, as if you have penetrated into some other reality. The shell of everyday life is torn apart. Second: intuitive insight. A flash of insight: you have comprehended the world, you have understood something previously unknown, you see the world with different eyes, you feel good and calm. Third: the affirmation of a positive attitude towards the world, coupled with pleasant emotions. Through tension you come to calmness.
Russian courage is similar to satori, but here it is more active, exalted, more sudden. The western "stream" is cultural, smoothed out. And in Russia, courage is always associated with risk, with a shocking effect, it is much more energetic. This is a kind of breakthrough from everyday life into a holiday. An amazing feeling of inner freedom - like wings behind your back, as if some unknown force is carrying us. This is a state of inner spontaneity. Access to your true self, the key to creativity. Feeling of a new reality: a person at such a moment lives a fuller, more interesting, emotionally rich life.
Courage is always fun, high spirits. People rarely swagger, being in a bad mood. Courage is always paired with courage. We do what we normally would never do.
The bandits gathered to take the bank: they put on masks, twist the trunks, shove grenades into their pockets. And one, a redhead, sits in the corner, smoking. And suddenly he declares: "No, guys, I will not go." There was a flurry of indignation: “What are you doing? Have you lost your mind? Sdreyfil? " The redhead trampled down the bull, spat: "Yes, no courage!"
How do you start the courage engine?
First, take the risk. Second: not to be afraid to shock others with your behavior, to show yourself from the other side, to break the stereotype of the perception of you by the environment. The third and most important thing is to solve a certain creative problem.
And what prevents you from entering a state of courage? Fear of taking risks and attachment to formal action.
Courage to courage - strife.
Drunken courage. It differs from true courage, like an ostrich from an eagle.
Episodic courage. It is akin to rain in a dry summer: unpredictable and random. It is spontaneous, almost independent of the purposeful will of a person.
Periodic courage. For some, it's like brushing your teeth. The toastmaster constantly holds feasts, swaggering. Creative people specifically evoke this state in themselves. In any case, only a mature person who has achieved a high level of professionalism in something is capable of periodic courage. If the lecturer does not know the material well, then courage will only ruin him, since the audience will not accept it.
But, and without going into the philosophy of courage, listen at least once to any hunter or fisherman, look at their glowing faces!
For example, a real hunter tells:
- And this was already in the Sahara, where I had long dreamed of hunting. I get out of the car, gun in hand. And suddenly a lion jumps out. I pull the trigger - misfire! I got into the cockpit - the engine stalled. Then at the moment - like a swallow - on a tree …
- Are there trees in the Sahara?
- Well, who pays attention to such a trifle in a moment of danger ?! Damn it, I knocked it down …
By swaggering, we become a little different - the way we dream to be, the way we would like to be perceived by others.
Of course, play yourself with inspiration - don't eat a pound of raisins. But it's worth a try. What if you will be born again? Like Ivan the brave, a daring fellow who leapt into a cauldron of boiling milk and emerged as a handsome man. Weak? Wasn't it weak in childhood to pretend to be D'Artanyan, Ivanhoe or Captain Nemo? And to fight for these roles with the whole court? And my mother could never shout out the window that it was time for lunch, homework, supper. How could D'Artanyan exchange hungry fun for a boring dinner, a sword for a briefcase with textbooks?
And now you ceremoniously walk with a briefcase into the presence, are afraid of losing your job and play the eternal role of an official, and in the evening - the role of a tired father of a family, a respectable couch husband. People at work are bored with you, children are bored, wife is bored. In all honesty, you yourself are bored with yourself. But now you are afraid of courage like the devil of incense. And life requires exactly courage! For her, he is like good yeast: then she ferments, foams, gets stronger and takes on a taste like aged beer. Well, beer, as you know, is a folk drink. And under drunkenness in Russia, who did not swagger! It is a pity that mostly only under the head. Maybe that is why our attitude to courage is ambiguous: in the evening a person will be pitying, and in the morning he is embarrassed to raise his eyes, like that Ivan - the hero of Shukshin in the film "Stoves-Benches". And the recipe for shame is simple: proved itself - fix the effect. After all, it is not for nothing that they say that a sober person is on his mind, then a drunk person is on his tongue. Become what you dream of yourself. After all, we suffer not from who we are, but from the fact that we cannot become what we want to be. Simply put, we dare not show off.
How do you see yourself ideally? Well, that means that this is exactly what you can be in reality. Only the courage is not enough for courage. But in fact there is nothing to lose, except for your own inert habits, which are akin to shackles. Courage brings out the best part of our soul into the light of day. Rarely, swagger, dress up like an idiot. Let that part of yourself develop that can fill the world around you with colors and sounds! And, perhaps, Shakespeare was right in asserting that life is a theater, and we are all actors in it. If we only play ourselves, we will lose our lives. We all, willingly or unwillingly, play some roles, imitating someone in our behavior, without even noticing it. And why not one day play a role that will help us to reveal ourselves as individuals and become a freer, more creative, more interesting person?
