Consider this/ Einfach zum Nachdenken

You might, or might not, be familiar with TED talks, a highly popular site with all kinds of video conferences, most of them no longer than 18 minutes. I browse it pretty regularly, since the presentations on such diverse topics as education, marine biology and theatre always fascinate me. So a week or so after said NYT editorial I bump into a talk by Brene Brown on “The Power of Vulnerability”. Brown is a social scientist and has researched shame, guilt and similar emotions. In her presentation she makes a very simply point: being vulnerable is hard, but very powerful. When you don’t pretend, make believe or wear a mask, but rather admit that you struggle, doubt and fear, something happens to your environment. People are disarmed, admit that they too are struggling, and a deep bond is established. As soon as I listened to that presentation, I knew what struck me about Angelina Jolie’s admission: it was profoundly vulnerable, even for the best-paid actress in Hollywood.

Thankfully most of us don’t have to go undergo such precautionary operations because of family history, at least not every week; and most of us will never be asked to write an op-ed piece in the New York Times or to speak at TED. But I believe there is a lesson to be learned. Many of us have grown wary of revealing our inner selves, out of fear of getting hurt. We’d rather display a cynical, hardened persona than to admit to our challenges; yet this very behaviour causes us to feel unconnected, isolated, misunderstood. In fact, many of us have given up feeling idealistic or excited, for the very reason that we could be disappointed. So we, and those around us, live in a cynical, somewhat sad environment. In her book “Daring Greatly”, Brown comments at length on a famous speech by Theodore Roosevelt- here is an excerpt:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

I know many people who criticize Angelina Jolie for being so “out there” about her operation; similarly we can be critical of public officials for their stance on various issues, or of friends who seem so naïve to pursue certain ideals. But all of them are daring greatly, rather than to sit in an armchair and criticize. May we find something we believe in and make ourselves vulnerable as we pursue it; our friends will thank us for it.