It was while she was engaged in this project that World War I began, and it wasn’t long before her nursing school was recruited as a full-fledged hospital for Allied soldiers.  Belgium, sitting between Germany and France, was the scene of heavy fighting as the German army advanced.  Cavell’s hospital was soon filled with wounded English soldiers, and when they recovered sufficiently, Cavell smuggled them to neutral Netherlands so they could return safely to their units, or to England.  Over 200 soldiers evaded capture by the German army through her efforts.

For this “crime,” Cavell was eventually arrested by the Germans and tried for treason – and executed by firing squad, despite frantic, international, diplomatic efforts to prevent her sentence from being carried out.

Before facing the firing squad, Cavell famously said, “Patriotism is not enough.  I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.” 

Looking back through 100 years, we can speculate about the types of courage that may have motivated Nurse Cavell in her choices.  Becoming a nurse at all in that day was a risky move – it wasn’t something “nice girls” did.  But she did.   Then simultaneously running a hospital and a smuggling operation would have required a degree of fortitude and executive management that somewhat boggles the mind.  Intellectual courage would have enabled focus and adaptability.  We know that she was a devout member of the Anglican church, and it seems fair to say that spiritual courage – that which fortifies us with a sense of purpose and meaning and makes forgiveness possible – was a significant part of her makeup.  (She was the daughter of a vicar, and raised with an ethic of sharing). Moral courage was clearly there, as well as the physical courage that nursing requires, especially wartime nursing.  She must also have had a very strong internal locus of control to believe that she was capable of effecting change amid the chaos of war, and to act so purposefully in on that conviction.

Much beyond that is difficult to surmise.  She was known as a private woman, reserved and formal toward her students and patients.  During her court-martial she made no attempt to disavow her activities, and she reportedly went to the firing squad with composure.  She was clearly a woman of great courage.

It is important to us on Lion’s Whiskers, however, to make it clear that courageous action is not limited to life-and-death risks such as the ones Edith Cavell took.  We have every reason to admire her courage, but we can’t let it convince us that because we haven’t done anything like this and faced a firing squad, we have not shown courage.  We are all capable of courage, because the risks we face are proportionate to our capacities and our circumstances.   If a teen speaks out against a popular bully and risks ostracism, it is no less courageous because there’s no firing squad in the offing.  A social “firing squad” can be devastating, and the number of teens who commit suicide because of it are tragic evidence.  

So let Edith Cavell inspire, but not intimidate. 

You can read more about Edith Cavell here on the website dedicated to her memory.

Intellectual courage, or being willing to face the risk of being wrong, allows for flexibility, inventiveness, adaptability, creativity, curiosity, objectivity, and focus.  Being unwilling to face the risk of being wrong (discovering we hold false beliefs) leads to rigidity, dogma, prejudice, and worst of all, more wrongness!  As philosopher George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”   Let me hasten to clarify what I  mean by false belief:  If you believed that two people were standing on your foot and it turned out it was only one person standing on your foot, that was a false belief.  If you further believed that the person standing on your foot was deliberately and maliciously hurting you, and it turned out the person was actually unaware of your foot there, that was a false belief.  I’m not talking about religion.

Refusing to accept the reality about the person standing on your foot is generally an indication that the risk of being wrong is truly enormous, that it threatens the very foundations of a whole system of beliefs.  A good example of this is the Inquisition of Gallileo, who presented evidence of planetary motion around the sun and the imperfection (in the form of sunspots) of the universe, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest because of it.  (In this case I am talking about religious belief.)

Two more insightful quotations are instructive here, the first from Aristotle, and the second from Emerson:

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”  

“Let me never fall into the vulgar  mistake of dreaming I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.” 

Not long ago I ran into a version of this problem with my daughter, who had decided that something she had been doing (let’s call it X) was not at all her cup of tea.  The problem arose when I asked how she felt about the thing that X was a subset of, and her position was she didn’t see anything positive about any of it, because she didn’t see anything positive about X.  She was taking the part for the whole, a logical fallacy called pars pro toto.  This is the (often false) belief that what is true for part of a thing is true for the whole thing.  I kept asking, “But what about this part, and this other part, and this other part?” and she dug her heels in even harder and claimed I was forcing her to accept X!

So I backed off.  Just as I have been trying to model that failure is always an option, I am trying to model that being wrong is always an option, too, and that revising an opinion in the light of new evidence is totally acceptable.  The more often I can find opportunities to say, “Oh, I guess I was wrong about that,” the better.  Mind you, at first I didn’t especially enjoy saying, “Look, there I go being wrong again,” but the truth is it actually gets easier the more I do it!   Lisa recently wrote about making failure okay, and how liberating it can be to let go of perfectionism, and I am finding it very liberating to make being wrong okay.  Besides, it’s exhausting having to be right all the time – and my friends will tell you it’s very annoying!

Here’s Kathryn Schulz’s liberating (and entertaining) TED lecture, and notice (near the end) what she has to say about stories.  Enjoy!
 

I have two anecdotes to share today, and then something to say about them.

Last year, my friend B. shared a wonderful “Plan B” story about a day she spent with her daughter, who was then a young teen. I don’t remember all the details, but I think the original plan was to take the train to New York City to see a Broadway show, and then shopping or some other treat. The timing was tricky though, because of other things on their schedule,  and B. decided they should have a Plan B – what they would do if the train was late, or the show was sold out, or any other monkey wrench in the machine. Long story short and indeed, the original plan fell through entirely, but they immediately switched to Plan B – which if I’m remembering correctly involved taking another train to Philadelphia and seeing an exhibit at a museum, and there was a second Plan B for the first Plan B which had to be implemented, because it was all on the fly – well, you get the picture. They had a fabulous time, and remember it fondly to this day as an adventure that unfolded one surprise after another like a series of gifts.

The second anecdote is less sunny. Twenty years or so ago I was having lunch with a college friend, who shared with me her dreams of making a career in a highly competitive industry. After some time (and plenty of expressions of encouragement, I assure you) I asked her, “what do you think you might do if that doesn’t work out?” A chilly silence descended. My question, it seemed, was as welcome as a bucket of icy water dumped over her head. I was genuinely surprised. Why not consider alternatives? Her plan involved the participation or cooperation or support at some level from many other people at many stages along the way, and other people are not always able or willing to participate or cooperate with or support our personal plans.

Plan B does not imply lack of confidence in Plan A. But it is an acknowledgment that things don’t always work out as we hope or expect. I think you could even argue that having a Plan B makes Plan A more likely to come to fruition, just as the safety net under a trapeze swinger makes going all out for the triple flip possible. One of the things I love about children is their wide embrace of possibilities. Ask a kid what she wants to be when she grows up and you may well get an answer like, “A doctor. Or a ballerina. Or maybe a professional chef.” The more paths we see leading away from our starting position the better. The more we limit ourselves to one set of options – the only options that can lead to the end of the rainbow – the more anxiety we feel. We see threats to that narrow range of options at every turn. Disappointment and defeat lurk behind every tree.   This is similar to what I wrote about a while back when I talked about different ways of dealing with obstacles – a limited range of options can make obstacles permanent.

Among the values that intellectual courage can help us activate are flexibility and adaptability; emotional courage can help us activate readiness and optimism; physical courage can help us with patience and social courage can help us with tolerance.  How about today making a Plan A with your kids for the weekend, and then making a Plan B to stick in your back pocket? Who knows what may happen? You may even find yourself hoping that Plan A falls through!

In this story, a new bird arrives in a part of the forest that is home to a lion and a fox. Not being a fast flyer, the bird is warned by everyone to leave. “I’ll have to get the lion and the fox to leave,” the bird replies. “It’s really too dangerous to have them here.” While the lion and the fox are both contemplating the nice meal they’ll make of the bird, the bird turns the tables on them both by appealing for help. The bird asks the lion to perform an act of physical strength (moving some fallen trees to reveal the berry bushes) and the fox to figure out how to get reeds from the pond for building a nest (he tells the herons that the fishing will be better if they pull out the reeds). Both lion and fox are stymied by this appeal to their generosity, as they cannot eat someone they’ve helped, and they must help when someone weaker asks for assistance. Once they have taken responsibility for the bird by helping, they must do the right thing and leave it be. Hungry, and rather baffled at having chosen not to eat the bird, the lion and the fox leave that part of the forest and search for somebody else to eat.

I find this fable fascinating for its insight into the tenuous social status of the nomadic Gypsies, or Rom, as they call themselves.  Always being an outsider who is greeted with suspicion means that they must get others to do the right thing themselves, rather than trick them (like a fox) or overpower them (like a lion).  Next time the Rom pass this way they don’t want to find revenge or bitterness waiting for them.  If instead they find people who have already chosen not to hurt them, that’s the best outcome!

Moral courage, as we have said on Lion’s Whiskers, entails discerning and doing the right thing. It speaks to the character traits of responsibility, accountability, and integrity, among others.  Sometimes doing the right thing means finding a way to encourage others to do the right thing, especially when their own moral courage is on the wane.  People who hold power  (bosses, political leaders, corporate stakeholders, etc.)  are likely to bristle when we hold them accountable for the things they are busy rationalizing or justifying; and when our children hold us accountable we may feel that bristling in ourselves.  I know I do!  Integrity and accountability aren’t always very comfortable in the moment,  but they usually result in a better night’s sleep.

When I was a teenager, we heard that two kids from a rival high school had been “parking” near the reservoir late one Saturday night. A news broadcast interrupted the music on the radio to warn that a dangerous serial killer with a hook for a hand had escaped from a hospital, and was being hunted by police in the area. The teens heard some scratching on the car, and without pausing to investigate, the boy put the pedal to the metal. That car spit gravel as they spun around and sped back out to Route 35. When they got back to the girl’s house, they were horrified to find a metal hook dangling from the rear bumper, still bloody from where it had been ripped out of a man’s arm. Swear to God, totally true. My cousin’s friend’s dentist’s baby-sitter knew them.

This spook story made the rounds when I was a teen in the 1970s, whispered in huddles of girls in the school halls and in the cafeteria. In fact, it had been steadily making the rounds since at least 1960, when this particular urban legend was first “reported.” We greeted the news as marginally credible, totally gross, and perfectly thrilling. Sociologists and folklorists have been collecting such urban legends for years, trying to tease out what these contemporary “myths” reveal about our culture, just as anthropologists search for cultural clues in ancient myths. In the case of the Bloody Hook, the consensus seems to be that it’s an effective warning not to go out necking with your boyfriend on Saturday night. Sex = mortal danger, in other words. We were happy to repeat the story, enjoying the thrill of grossing out friends who hadn’t heard this “totally true story,” yet, and speculating on how likely it was that it actually had happened.

And every Halloween, there were “reliable” reports and warnings about people who gave out poisoned candy and apples with razor blades in them. We didn’t really believe it then, but I’m sorry to say that the “reliable” reports have gained potency year after year until now there are communities where Trick-or-Treating is a relic of a “safer” past. Parents are too fearful to let their children go door to door and risk being given chocolate laced with strychnine or arsenic. However, if you go to Snopes.com (the premier hoax-busting website) you will discover that there never has been a case of a person maliciously poisoning candy to give to Trick-or-Treaters.

Why are we so ready to believe our neighbors are capable of such things? Why, when hearing patently dubious claims, are we so gullible? Why do we not ask to see the police reports or news stories? Why, when someone tells us that such-and-such causes cancer, do we not ask for the source of this “information,” but dutifully forward it to everyone in our address book? It’s tempting to surmise that people just like to believe they are beset by dangers on all sides (otherwise why would they so willingly believe it?). With the Internet handy it’s often the work of just minutes to bust a hoax, and yet hardly a week goes by when I don’t find some heartfelt warning in my inbox, urging me to share it with my loved ones.

I think back to my teen years and the thrilling sensations I experienced when hearing about The Bloody Hook; among the feelings I relished the most were the ones relating to how safe I felt that my friends had shared it with me! We had each other’s backs! No crazy Hook Man was going to get me because my girlfriends were looking out for me! That feels awesome, and it’s worth having a crazy Hook Man on the loose. Maybe nameless teen angst needs a scapegoat, a boogeyman we can circle the wagons against.

But seriously. If we actually want to be safe, instead of just feeling safe, it’s up to us to be critical consumers of information. A feeling of security is pointless without actual security, and a false sense of danger can distort a secure life in truly harmful ways, not the least by trampling joy and freedom. Intellectual courage can help us dig for verification of the alarms and warnings that come our way. It can help us teach our kids what healthy skepticism is, and teach us to be better at risk assessment (e.g. air travel not statistically dangerous, driving without a seat belt statistically really dangerous). Intellectual courage can save us from the bloody hook.

The good news: here is a delightful story I was reminded of recently, the story of the Brave Little Dutch Boy, a tale of moral courage, physical courage, emotional courage, the story that gives us the popular image of beating back disaster by the narrowest margin: the finger in the dike. I loved this story when I was young. It was so inspiring!

In the old city of Haarlem, the sea was held back by strong dikes, great walls of earth which protected the low-lying coastal lands. From atop the dykes one had beautiful views of the sea on one side, and the rich green farms on the other. For a little boy named Hendrik, walking along the tops of the dikes was a great pleasure, and one evening, coming home from his grandmother’s house, he was enjoying the view of the wintry sea when he heard a small, watery trickle. The light was fading, but he peered around, wondering where the sound was coming from. He cocked an ear, and following the noise he made his way down the back side of the dike, where shadows were already gathering. To his dismay, he saw water spurting through a tiny hole. Now, Hendrik was very young, but even young children in that country knew that the dikes were what protected their farms and homes and livestock. A small leak could quickly become a larger leak, and when the tide turned and pressed with all its might the dike could give way completely, flooding the entire city! In growing alarm, Hendrik looked around for something to plug the hole with. Nothing. Without giving it further thought, Hendrik stuck his finger into the dike. “Help!” he cried, looking out across the twilit fields. “Help!” Night fell, and the cold, damp air wrapped around the shivering, frightened boy. Visions of his warm supper and fireside filled his imagination, only to be chased away by visions of raging floodwaters. He dared not leave, for he knew it could spell disaster. “Help!” he called again, his voice hoarse. “Someone help me!” At last, he saw a lantern bobbing in the darkness, coming closer and closer. A search party had been sent to find him, his father in the lead. “My brave boy!” Hendrik’s father cried. While the strong men of Haarlem set to work repairing the dike, the young hero was carried home, given his supper, and tucked into bed.

Delightful story! Beloved by millions! But here’s the bad news. I’m sorry to say that this story is not a traditional Dutch story at all, but 19th Century American product of “Holland-Mania.” Careful consideration of the story along with even the slightest experience with wet soil will make it clear that the story cannot represent any sort of real scenario. The Dutch, with centuries of experience of using dikes to keep the sea out of their low-lying country, would never have invented such an improbable tale. If an earthen dike is saturated enough with water to start leaking, one finger will never hold back the tide.  I reckon the inventor of the tale was picturing something more like a brick wall with a bit of loose mortar, not a real levee or dike.

And yet, what is interesting (to me) is how popular the story became, and how enduring the image of the boy with his finger in the dike is. We like to imagine the lone, small, heroic figure struggling against a mighty force to do the right thing. Perhaps what comforts us is thinking that we can be saved by the efforts of a few individuals while we are comfortably eating our dinners, and that our courage can be kept warm and dry while someone else braves the rising tide. Sorry to say, I don’t think that’s true. Neither do the Dutch, by the way. In 2007 that country prepared a 200-year plan to deal with the effects of global climate change and rising sea levels on their low-lying nation. Talk about the intellectual courage to tackle uncomfortable facts!

Just because this story isn’t a traditional folk tale doesn’t mean I won’t tell it to my daughter.  Helping her develop courage is part of my plan for preparing for the future.  It’s not a 200-year plan, more of a 20-year plan.  We all need the courage of the Brave Little Dutch Boy, even if he was fabricated as an unrealistic, romantic fantasy.  So really, this is more a Bad News/Good News essay than a Good News/Bad News one.  The bad news is we are all going to need a lot of courage; the good news is, we all have that potential, especially our kids. 

.

Versions of this tale have been collected from many countries, including Korea, Japan, China, the Philippines, Tanzania and Kenya. Details change to suit local circumstances, but the gist of the story – and the payoff – remain the same. I’ve written before about the benefit of telling trickster stories. Here is a classic example of quick wits and intellectual courage in action.

Monkey loved mangoes, of course. Who does not? And his favorite mango tree had branches that reached out over a river, where a certain crocodile came quite often.

“Why do you come here, lurking and smirking?” Monkey asked one day, hanging just out of reach and eating a sweet piece of fruit.

“I come because one of these days you will slip,” Crocodile replied. “And I will catch you and take you to my king.”

Monkey laughed, and swung back up onto the branch. “Really? We’ll see about that!”

But Crocodile was patient, and one day, sure enough! – Monkey’s hands were slippery with mango juice and he fell sploosh! into the river.

“I have you now,” Crocodile said, tossing Monkey onto his bumpy back. “My king will be so pleased. A fortune-teller told him that if he ate a monkey’s heart he would live forever, and now I will be the one to deliver it to him!”

Monkey gasped. “Oh no! You’ve made a big mistake!”

“I’m sure you think so!” Crocodile said. “Now bid farewell to the world of trees and sky, and prepare to meet the world of mud and sunken bones at the bottom of the river.”

“You don’t understand,” Monkey continued, thinking fast. “I am honored to grant everlasting life to your king, but my heart is still in the tree!“

The crocodile hesitated. “What’s that?”

Pointing to the mango tree, Monkey said, “I always take my heart out and put it on a branch before I pick fruit. I thought everyone knew that. If you just let me get it I’ll be glad to go with you.”

Crocodile thought about what would happen if he presented his king a monkey with no heart.   No, the king would not be pleased at all.  With one quick whip of his tail he lunged for the shore so Monkey could hop off. “Hurry!” Crocodile commanded.

Quick as thought, Monkey climbed to the highest branch of the mango tree and laughed so hard he got an ache in his side. “You fool!” he mocked. “Whoever heard of a monkey with no heart! Your king will have to wait a long time before he ever gets mine!”

Angry and embarrassed, Crocodile sank below the surface, leaving a trail of bubbles behind. He never returned to that part of the river, because whenever he came anywhere near, he could hear Monkey laughing, laughing, laughing…

A fable from Aesop that has seen a lot of play over the centuries is the Ant and the Grasshopper. The story extols the industrious ant who spends the summer working and storing food, and also points out the improvidence of the grasshopper who fiddles and sings all summer long, ends up starving through the winter and knocking on the ant’s door for a hand-out.

Chances are, (if you are American) you’re a grasshopper. The U.S. personal savings rate is the lowest among developed nations. Why is that? And what’s it got to do with Lion’s Whiskers?

Here’s some information that may require some intellectual courage to process. 85% of Americans expect their kids to go to college, but 47% of American parents can’t afford that education for their kids. Many families do save for college (although not enough); many parents raid their retirement savings to pay for college (considered a bad idea indeed); and a great many expect to take financial aid and student loans when the time comes. Yet according to the College Savings Foundation, the cost of borrowing money for college v. the cost of saving for college is 7:1. Let me put that in another way. Let’s say you spend $10 per week now on saving for college. If you wait and borrow the money instead, it will cost you $70 per week to pay off. That’s a pretty impressive difference. $10 per week now or $10 per day later?

We know from psychology research that our cognitive biases (e.g. the tendency to discount information that contradicts our wishes or shows our previous decision-making to have been flawed) really mess up our ability to make decisions, especially decisions having to do with the long-range future. And when it comes to parenting, many of us live in “putting out the fire” mode instead of “fire prevention” mode. It’s hard to make long-term plans when you need to know how to get a colicky baby to sleep tonight, or you need to make decisions about which parental control software to install on the computer today so the kids don’t start downloading crazy stuff on Saturday night while the baby-sitter is busy texting friends. But the parenting industry thrives because of the “putting out the fire” mentality that so many parents live with. Fear is used as a marketing crowbar to pry money from our hands to throw on the fire. And yet the fact is, much of the time there really is no fire; we’re just conditioned to believe without question all the messages that tell us there is. If we don’t do this, buy that, register here NOW we’ll thwart our children’s hopes and dreams, damage their self-esteem, poison them, put them in mortal danger, expose them to creepy people and also maybe make them fat and stupid. Spending money to quiet those fears gives us a false sense of security, and allows us to to go back to the fun stuff, like spending the summer fiddling and singing. (Grasshopper).

Instead of being reactive to the fear messages, we can be proactive about real challenges that lie ahead. (Winter). We can walk out of the store (or the on-line mall) with our credit cards unswiped. Instead we can save those dollars for the long-term so that our children don’t leave college buried in loans. If we really want the best for our kids, it seems to me, we’d do better foregoing the latest, newest everything now, and give them the gift of education without crushing debt. (Ant).

For many people, spending money can be related to a lack of emotional courage, if buying something is motivated by boredom, escapism or loneliness; spending money may be related to a lack of social courage, if buying something is motivated by a desire to be trendy or ahead of the wave; spending money may be related to a lack of spiritual courage, if buying something is motivated by feelings of purposelessness and the need to fill a spiritual hole; it may be motivated by a lack of moral courage, if buying something is inspired by feelings of entitlement or egocentricity; it may be motivated by a lack of physical courage, if it is inspired by a false belief that buying something will make one look better, live longer, or lose belly fat fast.

According to statistics available on the National Financial Educators Council website, teens and young adults report feeling woefully unprepared to manage money – the mysteries of checkbook balancing, credit card interest rates, debt payments and budgeting are scary, confusing and intimidating. But children as young as five can start learning about money – if someone will teach them. It may be more convenient to go to the bank when the kids are at school, but for the most part they aren’t learning anything about money at school. They must learn it from us. They must see us actively making financial decisions and setting financial goals; they must see us basing our spending, our savings, and our charitable giving on those goals instead of on impulsiveness. Yes, itchy as it sounds, we must model being ants for them.

It’s way more fun to be the grasshopper. And it’s okay to be the grasshopper some of the time, but we must have the courage to be ants as well. Whether our children grow up as grasshoppers or ants may mean the difference between them moving back home after college or going out into the world as courageous and independent young people who know how to get through the winter.