‘The awful daring of a moment’s surrender,
which an age of prudence can never retract.’
( T.S.Eliot, The Wasteland.)
This quotation stopped me in my tracks whilst reading Aidan Chamber’s excellent ‘coming of age’ love story yesterday. Although nowadays we seem to have lost the word ‘awful’ to a straight forward meaning signifying ‘truly bad’ , I am not sure that Eliot is recommending a life of risk less dailiness and safety checks here!
I wondered instead how ‘awful’ might be a very good thing indeed and that Aidan Chamber’s character Hal, is being gifted with the opportunity to fall in love beyond the boundaries of the prescribed and permitted. His love goes ‘outside’ mere convention and habit.
Giving up your safety checks, taking a risk, and becoming vulnerable , may let in the unique, the real, the marrow deep love, the new career path and experience.
Thus, ‘Awful’ may instead signify full of ‘awe’ , a feeling of tremendous respect for something grander and perhaps more spiritually transformative than anything we have ever encountered before.
By staying where we are, our daily lives may miss the awful, taking careful refuge instead in the prudent way.
But think as we travel the road very much travelled what we are missing by remaining on the safe side of daring.
- We are missing a chance to improve our confidence. Our confidence for life!
- We are missing the opportunity to think and feel differently.
- We miss or dilute our authenticity.
- We miss our lives somewhere along the well travelled way.
- We miss ourselves.
Janet Lewison