You go with the flow and don't rock the boat. Your only hope is that the currents of life will pull you in the right direction. You begin to take your fears for real. You cocoon yourself into a life that insulates you from all these risks. Then you rationalise your behaviour: you have a family to support, and can't take risks, you're too old to shift careers, you can't lose weight because you have 'fat' genes. Five... ten... twenty years pass, and you realise that your life hasn't changed much. You settle down. All that's really left now is to live out the remainder of your years as contently as possible and then settle yourself into the ground, where you'll finally achieve total safety and security.

Those with courage do a different kind of rationalising. Thus, they saddle up anyway despite being scared to death, thinking if there is nothing else that can be gained, at least they have gained strength and confidence by every experience in which they really stop to stare fear in the face. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is the judgment that something else is more important. It is the mastery of fear. The courageous simply do the things they think they cannot. The courageous dare to be who they truly are.