When I arrived in Hamburg I wandered around the city for a few hours before figuring out how to get to the school where the sangha was staying. I had researched the location a little bit before leaving the states and I had a pretty good map of Hamburg so I found it without difficulty. When I got to the school it was empty, everyone was at the public teaching. So I dropped my bags off and wandered around Hamburg some more. When I was walking back to the school, I met the Sangha on the street, walking to the subway to go to a dharma talk at a University. I joined them and talked with some of my American friends, who are monks. On the subway platform, I met my teacher and spoke to him for a little while. He asked where I had come from. This was a reasonable question, considering I am an American and I just kind of appeared on a subway platform in Hamburg. I told him about my travels and how I had gotten to Hamburg. A woman in the sangha that I had met a few times before overheard me and exclaimed "You did all this traveling by yourself!? You are so brave!"
In typical zen master fashion, my teacher smiled silently at me and I laughed. 'No, Anna, that part wasn't brave. This part here, this is me being brave.'
But I understood where she was coming from. To her it was natural to be grounded in a community, to feel comforted, safe and supported by a group. So the idea of traveling alone seemed brave to her. Yet I am the opposite so my independent traveling isn't brave, it's my nature - what comes naturally to me. What is difficult for me is to balance my natural state of autonomy within a group dynamic.
Thinking about this exchange made me look up the definition of bravery, which led to the definition of courage - "the quality of mind or spirit that enables a person to face difficulty, danger, pain, etc., without fear"
In the above definition of courage (by way of bravery), I don't know that absence of fear is always accurate. It's natural to be afraid of a situation we see as potentially difficult. Yet when we recognize the value of going through that experience and choose to put ourselves in a potentially uncomfortable situation to experience a perceived benefit, perhaps the fear is overcome.
It strikes me that we don't always know when someone is being brave. Unless we know someone well, we can't know what situations they might interpret as potentially difficult, dangerous or painful. Like Anna, we might see them doing something that we find daring, yet sometimes it's the subtler bravery that isn't apparent. Staying with a large group of people for a week, I not only had to face my habits of autonomy and introversion, I also had to face my perception that I am powerless to navigate the emotional currents in a group dynamic. I often feel overpowered by them and tangled up. To someone like Anna, my discomfort might seem completely ridiculous and so it would never occur to her that bravery might be necessary for me to spend a lot of time with a group of people I care about.
The thing is, when I think about traveling, I don't think of it as being difficult or dangerous. Navigating a foreign city is thrilling to me because there are no emotional stakes, which are the ones I worry about the most. The worst that could happen is I get lost. And I have a lot of confidence in my ability to figure that out. When traveling alone there is no need to temper my autonomy, in fact - that autonomy is a strength!
During that week I was able to strike a balance between myself and others. There were times when I felt overwhelmed by the group or overwhelmed by being in a crowd of 20,000 people listening to the Dalai Lama. The trick I found was to be compassionate to my fear yet try not to lose sight of the benefit of facing it. To find a middle ground that was comfortable to me.
Because the teaching was in Tibetan, almost everyone was given a personal radio with different channels for each translated language. When I felt like I needed a little space, I would go out to the area around the stadium and lay on the grass, under a tree, listening to the teaching on the headset. At the lunchbreak, I often joined some of my friends in the sangha for an ice cream cone at a nearby shop. Having recognized my fear and faced it compassionately, I was able to experience the benefit of the group dynamic that I usually perceive as difficult.
And this is the benefit of bravery - to experience something new, something that answers fear with another possible reality.
