The Courage of Harriet Tubman

There have been many stories of people who have persisted in the face of agonizing anxiety, but we could hardly find a story to about someone more admirable than Harriet Tubman. At 13 years old, she was a field slave in rural Maryland.  One day for no apparent reason, an overseer decided to whip the slave standing next to her, and although she was shaking the fear, she placed herself between them in an effort to prevent the beating.  She had witnessed this atrocity many times and could stand it no longer.  Infuriated, the overseer threw a two-pound weight at her and struck her in the head, knocking her unconscious. 

She was bedridden for many months, and being a deeply religious child, she thought long and hard on the wrongs of slavery.  In 1849, having learned that she and her brothers and sisters were going to be sold, she decided to try to escape.  She has told about the terror she felt as she slipped away and walked by night for hundreds of miles through slave-catching territory. Miraculously, she managed to reach Pennsylvania.  Realizing that she had attained safety, she recalled, “I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person, now that I was free.” 

Working as a domestic in Philadelphia, Ms. Tubman met the leader of the under-ground railroad, William Still.  He had brought many slaves through the secret channels to the freedom of the North.  He persuaded her that she could be helpful to him, and although she was terrified of being caught and put back into the horrible conditions that she had left, she agreed to participate.  She made at least 15 tension-filled trips into the deep South and helped an estimated 300 slaves to escape.  She even managed to get her parents and six of her 10 brothers and sisters out of the abysmal conditions in which they were living.  Soon the slaveholders, realizing it was she who was responsible for these offenses against their “property rights,” offered the huge sum of $40,000 for her capture.  Although she had many close calls, she was never apprehended. 

We cannot know whether Harriet Tubman was an anxious person; we can be certain that many times in her life she was terrified, but she never stopped. She never lost a passenger, she never lost her nerve, and therefore, she is a heroine to anyone trying to persevere in the face of anxiety.

Why are some people so unflagging in the pursuit of their goals, while others find it so hard to persevere? There are many factors, of course, but when you come right down to it, the difference amounts to one trait: desire.

The treatment of anxiety disorders almost always involves making the problem worse for a while before it gets better. That is the major reason, and I believe, that in the midst of carrying out a plan for dealing with their fears, anxious people quite often lose their desire to go on.  Their need to protect themselves from frightened feelings overwhelms their zeal for progress, and gradually they lose their drive.  We have named this process "drift." Usually without realizing it, these children begin to drift into self-defeating thoughts. Before they know it, they have lost faith in their plan. But most of them have an asset that they fail to realize -- their creative imaginations.

ACQUIRING A SENSE OF PERSONAL COURAGE
Creativity expert Dr. Paul Torrance states that after all the years he has been studying personality traits of renowned innovators, he finds courage to be their most prevalent quality.  He further learned that, “Having a passionate love for something is probably the key to being courageous.”

Being passionate about something can bring great joy, but it also requires an intensity that can cause psychological pain.  Our brains are designed to protect us from overload -- they rebel against ddoing hard, boring thing for extensive periods of time. Of course, I am thinking of social isolation here. There are few of us who can easily endure the psychological pain of this intensity for long, so we prematurely discard ideas that, if followed up and worked with, might prove to be of great value. It takes a conscious attempt to summon your courage, your “grit.” especially when you are frightened. But you can and must do it, and you will be eternally glad if you do!