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.

Just like I coach parents to do with their children, I gave myself the freedom to choose.  I yelled back to my kids “Don’t push me.  I need to do this on my own without any added pressure, thanks! Just give me a minute to regroup. I’m not sure I really want to do this yet?”  I weighed my personal pros and cons for completing the climb.  I asked myself what I was really afraid of and how realistic it was that the tower would completely collapse at the very moment I was climbing the final ascent—after more than 100+ years standing!  I wasn’t THAT special nor my karma THAT bad.  I engaged in some positive self-talk, like “I can do this.  My kids will be proud of me.  I will get to see the majestic view.  I will have done my ‘something that scares me’ thing today.  I can cross this climb of my list of things to do in life.” Basically, I needed to outwit, out think, my fear.

Eventually what worked was to just focus on what was immediately in front of me.  I didn’t look down, and I didn’t look up.  We tend to scare ourselves the most with thoughts of the future or regrets from the past, instead of just tackling what is right in front of us.  The old adage that I now apply to writing for this blog, especially, is to never underestimate what I can accomplish in 15 minutes of focused activity.  I may not know exactly what will come of all this research, talk, and writing about courage—and I may even have to suffer through noticing more my own cowardice than my courage in the process—but I just have to keep showing up. 

The good thing about writing this blog?  It forces me to look for opportunities where I can boost my courage quotient—especially in front of my kids.  It keeps me real.  Hopefully reading our blog inspires you, too, to bring awareness to the areas where you and/or your child are social courage climbers, but perhaps more likely to quit physical courage challenges?  Perhaps you’ve camped long enough as a family in the moral courage camp, and it’s time for a spiritual courage climb?  Regardless of whether you are camping, climbing, or quitting in the various areas of your life, it takes intellectual and emotional courage to reflect on the choices we make and the ripple effects in our lives and the lives of our children. 

For nearly a year now we’ve been talking about the nature of courage and courage development in children, and talking about courage as the mechanism for activating other values or qualities (some might like the word “virtues.”) Today, here are my thoughts about one of those values, qualities or virtues: patience.

Patience can be activated by physical courage if it requires sitting still or restraining an impulse; it might be supported by emotional courage if it requires a belief in a loved one’s ability to fulfill a promise; it might be activated by spiritual courage if it requires willingness to live in uncertainty about purpose or meaning during chaotic times. I’m sure by now our faithful readers can extrapolate their own examples for the six types of courage as they relate to patience.

We know that fear is inspired by uncertainty and lack of control. While we are waiting for something we are uncertain: will it happen at all? will I like it? will it be what I imagine? will I get a piece with blue frosting or yellow frosting? On top of that is the uncertainty of how we will manage our disappointment if IT doesn’t fulfill our expectations. While we are waiting for something we usually have no control, since we can’t speed up time or manipulate events. Thus, the ability to tolerate this uncertainty and lack of control requires courage, which then allows for patience.

I’ve been noticing recently how waiting has changed since my own childhood. The Wizard of Oz was broadcast on television once a year, and missing it meant having to wait another year. Likewise for The Sound of Music, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and countless other “big” or seasonal movies. In just the four years since my daughter arrived here from Ethiopia at the age of eight, we’ve gone from being able to buy a movie on DVD to watch anytime, to being able to download or stream movies instantly to laptop, tablet or t.v. You don’t even have to go to the store to buy the DVD (or to the library to borrow it). No waiting required. Same with music, many television shows, and books. Instantly has become the one of the dominant motifs of our children’s growing-up years.

As I see it, we seek to quell the fear inspired by uncertainty through instant gratification.  The insidious problem with that is that it’s never enough; there will always be something else just one step ahead of us in the future, creating uncertainty.  On top of that, the false promise of instant gratification obscures the fact that some things can never be instant – skill does not come instantly, for example, but must be developed through hours, weeks or years of steady practice.  Without patience we quit early, grumpy and disenchanted by the tedious slowness of it all.

This is not a rant about how much better things were when I was a kid, or how much worse they are now (they weren’t and they aren’t). I’m just saying that they are different as it relates to organic opportunities for learning the skill of waiting. We are swimming in instant: instant foods, instant entertainment, instant messages, instant downloads, instant photos, instant feedback, etc.. Because of this, I find I have been looking for opportunities to teach this skill of waiting to my daughter. In my post “I Can’t Do It. Yet.” I wrote about the word “Yet” as a great tool for coaching patience – as in, “it’s true you can’t do it yet, but keep trying and eventually you will.”

Very young children live in the present, so for them, waiting for anything is a baffling torment of “why? why? why?” Sometimes the only thing that a parent can do is distract, as in this story from India, Birbal Shortens the Road.  But as children get older and the concept of time becomes more concrete, cause and effect begin to make sense. At twelve, my daughter is young enough to be highly reactive and suggestible (Mom, can I get this song on my iPod right now?) but old enough to recognize that Mom doesn’t play that tune, if you know what I mean. To help her with learning patience, I try to take some of the sting out of the uncertainty of waiting: I am boringly predictable and consistent with routines (dinner at six, regular bedtime, daily chores, etc.) I make sure she understands what she has to do to earn the next download to her iPod. I try to be clear about when things will happen in the future, such as when she will achieve the sparkling dream of cell phone ownership. I tell her what new privileges and opportunities she can look forward to next year or the years after that, and involve her in planning future events or activities.

At the same time, I point out that although I have expectations about the future, I can’t control it. I expect it will take about twenty more minutes to get home from this BORING car trip, but we could run into traffic, or we might see an awesome tag sale going on, or something unforeseen may occur. I tell her that I acknowledge my uncertainty and my lack of control over the future, and demonstrate by my own patience that it’s possible to survive both. (By the way, I’m talking about best-case scenarios, not the ones where I lose my temper and my patience!)

In the end, patience may simply be a matter of accepting reality. No amount of fretting and agitation in the present can alter the space-time continuum to make time speed up, so just let it go.  Just wait.

First, a word about Baba Yaga, who appears in many many Russian tales.  Much has been written over the years about witches and wicked stepmothers and fairy godmothers in folklore.  Metaphorically splitting the “great mother” into a good/benevolent character and an evil/malevolent character simplifies things in tales and may help kids manage their conflicting feelings.   Ambiguity and ambivalence tend to muddy the waters.   That’s why Baba Yaga is a fascinating figure.  She is almost always represented as a horrible, cannibalistic witch living in a house of human bones – but she still does good deeds from time to time, or takes righteous vengeance on behalf of the protagonist.  In this book you will find all the duality of the “great mother” inhabiting Baba Yaga – a powerful, dangerous figure who commands powerful natural forces and sends Vasilisa home to her wicked stepmother and stepsisters with a reward.  For this reason, this story (fairly lengthy and complex, and hard to summarize) is best suited to independent reading by older children who can manage the ambiguity.  My 12-year-old daughter was fascinated by it.

What may be most memorable about Vasilisa is her little doll, given to her by her dying mother.  The (secret) doll goes everywhere with Vasilisa, hidden in her apron.  When given food and drink, it comes to life to give comfort, advice and aid to the sad and lonesome girl.  This source of spiritual courage is easily recognized as Vasilisa’s dead mother, referred to obliquely as “my mother’s blessing” or “my mother’s love,” the source of her fortitude.  Vasilisa does much more than Cinderella ever had to do to earn her triumph at the end, and keeping her composure around Baba Yaga, as well as performing the difficult chores set to test her, are part of that.

For kids looking for a good creepy scare this Halloween season, the artwork in this book will not disappoint.  Full of Russian costumes, folkmotifs and intricate detail, the pictures offer much to examine – even if some inspire a hasty page-turn!

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.

Saints Among the Animals, written by Cynthia Zarin and illustrated by Leonid Gore, is a beautifully simple book for independent readers, giving very short stories of some of the saints whose legends involve animals.  St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio is here, of course, but so are much lesser known saints.  There is Saint Werbuge, who patiently reasoned with a flock of geese that were destroying farm crops; we have Saint Canice, who used the antlers of a living stag as a book stand, Saint Colman, for whom a fly acted as a reliable living bookmark.  Ten saints make up the collection, offering a glimpse of a simpler time when people were still sorting out what it might mean to be Christian (perhaps a quest still ongoing?) and what embracing all living things might look like.  These are mostly gentle courage stories, about people with the courage to live as their consciences commanded, without heed for raised eyebrows among their fellow human beings.  That makes these stories of moral courage and social courage, as well as spiritual courage.  Read these stories on your own to retell to younger children on a nature walk, perhaps, or leave for your older reader to nibble on.  The writing is excellent, not didactic, and not in any way evangelizing.  It’s very fine.

“Sing praises to Sister Moon and the stars… sing praises to Brother Wind and to the air and the clouds…Sing praises to Sister Water…”  Part of a Mohawk blessing song in a Joseph Bruchac book maybe?   No, this is from the Canticle of Brother Sun, written by Saint Francis.   Saint Francis Sings to Brother Sun: A Celebration of His Kinship with Nature, by Karen Pandell with illustrations by Bijou Le Tord, is a truly exquisite book for young and old.  In large format with deceptively rustic pictures (they seem childishly simple, until you look closely) the book outlines the life of Francis of Assisi in brief vignettes, interspersed with verses of the canticle (which would make an awesome dinner blessing for a special occasion.)  What would that really be like, to give away everything as Saint Francis did?  To save no food for tomorrow but to give it to the birds and rely on providence for tomorrow?  In today’s possession-heavy world, it’s a challenge to imagine the wealthy and privileged young Francis taking a vow of poverty, and walking so carefully that he not harm a worm, or an ant, or even tread carelessly on spilled water.  In this we see echoes of the Buddha’s journey and practice.  Such complete reverence for all of life actually takes extraordinary courage.  You might be inspired to create a courage challenge for yourself and your family: spend a day doing no harm to any living thing.  What does it take? What will it cost you?  Do you need the courage of a saint?

If you spend a day at the museum with lots of old paintings, one of the easiest saints for children to recognize in sculpture and painting is St. Francis. A gentle monk surrounded by forest creatures is a benevolent and appealing image, and I suspect it mirrors the secret longing of so many children – talking with animals. This story of Francis, like many traditional tales, features danger in the form of a ferocious wolf.