It takes courage to enjoy it

The Retune Blog - 18th August 2023

It’s been A-level results day this week. It’s always really interesting seeing how people respond to their results. When I was completing my second degree I remember getting my results. I got a 2:2, but it was close to being a 2:1 and my personal tutor said he'd be willing to support an appeal. I decided not to appeal the result, partly because I was quite happy with it, and partly because I thought it didn’t really make any difference. It didn’t impact on me qualifying as a Probation Officer, didn’t impact my pay, and was still enough for me to get on to the post-graduate course I wanted to complete.

But really, whatever results we get, or in a wider sense, situations we find ourselves in, we can still fall into the trap of thinking what we’ve done isn’t good enough. This week’s song, Big Time Sensuality by Bjork offer a really inspiring perspective on this:

It takes courage to enjoy it.

It’s a really human characteristic to look back and try to analyse what we could have done differently. In fact, in a society which is obsessed with finding blame, it's a social norm to look back (and to try to attribute blame). But what if we were to look forward instead?

That’s why I love this lyric by Bjork. It challenges us that moving forward in life takes real bravery and effort. To be able to accept where we are and move forward takes courage. To look back and find reasons or excuses is an easy trap to fall into, and may at times be necessary and important, but doesn’t provide us with hope. Indeed, this idea of hope is integral in the song:

I don't know my future after this weekend, and I don't want to.

Hope has an interesting quality, that of uncertainty. Whilst we can know the past, we cannot know the future. Hope embraces this uncertainty. For us to embrace this kind of hope takes courage. A courage that challenges us to look beyond what we’ve done, what we’ve experienced, and welcomes whatever may lie ahead.Yet, this kind of hope isn’t mindlessly optimistic. In researching hope for The Life Garage it was interesting to see how the idea of courageous hope was being used in the care of terminally ill patients. Here hope wasn’t a hope that everything was going to be great, but an acceptance that we can choose our response to situations we don’t choose. Now that takes real courage.