Courage Is Just Dreams With Shoes On (The Tedx Talk I haven’t given…yet!)

Last updated on: August 18, 2015 at 5:50 am by Reba Riley

Courage Is Just Dreams With Shoes On (The Tedx Talk I haven’t given…yet!) 2015-08-18T05:50:25-04:00 Reba Riley

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Allow me to tell you the very worst thing about giving a Tedx talk with “courage” in the title: you cannot back out because you’re scared. No matter how much you want to run out the back door screaming, you have to go on when they call your name, because, um… courage?

So here I am, shoeless [gestures to bare feet], which you may have noticed. I promise I’ll get to why I’m barefoot, but first I’d like to ask you all to close your eyes. Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you to hold hands or sing Kumbaya.
Now I’m going to say a word three times, and I’m going to ask you to think of the person or action that word reminds you of.

Ready? Courage. Courage. Courage.
You can open your eyes. What did you think of?
Chances are very good you thought of something or someone extraordinarily brave: the firefighters who ran into the world trade center on September 11th; the teachers who gave their lives for students at Sandy Hook; the soldiers who protect our collective freedom.
Did anyone think of someone doing something normal like, say—putting on shoes? Please no one say yes, it will totally ruin my spiel!
Of course you didn’t: Let’s face it, putting on shoes isn’t exactly the stuff of Rocky movies.
But there is a time in all our lives when seemingly insignificant actions like putting on shoes become everyday acts of courage. That time is when we are broken. Life breaks us in a million ways, and we all have our own story of something that divides time into “before” and “after”: a death, divorce, bankruptcy, terrifying diagnosis, grief that feels too big to bear. For me, it was a decade of chronic illness that often left me bedridden, often too tired and in too much pain to even lift a glass of water from the nightstand.
But whatever the “it” is that breaks us—“it” leaves us shattered, in pieces. It leaves us broken.
When we are broken, we dream a lot. We dream that someday it won’t hurt to wake up. We dream that someday we won’t cry every hour. We dream that someday every step won’t be painful. We dream that there will come a day when we will be whole again—because somewhere deep inside, we know that it is what we do with the pieces of our shattered life that will make us who we are.
But the only way we can even begin to put ourselves back together is to do the very next thing. And the very next thing often doesn’t look very courageous from the outside. Doing the very next thing looks getting out of bed, washing our dishes, feeding our children, going to work.
Doing the next thing looks like putting on our shoes.
I didn’t know this when I was so chronically sick for years, struggling to manage life’s smallest tasks. When I looked at myself, all I saw was failure. I saw someone who could barely get out of bed, with stacks of un-done to-do lists and piles of dirty clothes, who was hanging onto her job and her life by a thread.
I can tell you one thing for sure—my day-to-day life didn’t look like courage. It looked like a messy kitchen. It didn’t smell like courage either—what with the dirty laundry and all.
But I was courageous.
Every single time I got out of bed, every single time I put on my shoes, those were acts of everyday courage. It was only by doing those things that I would eventually be able to find a doctor who could diagnose me and find a treatment that worked.
I didn’t know that I was courageous until much later, when I could look back at that poor, sick girl I was, berating herself for failure and say, “Oh honey, every time you put on your shoes, you are being courageous. It is putting on your shoes and putting one foot in front of the other that is going to make your dreams come true.

So that is why I am here today, to tell you what I didn’t know then.
Courage is just dreams with shoes on.
And the reason I’m barefoot is because the next time you put on your shoes I want you to remember:

You are already far more courageous than you realize.

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