Austin Kleon – a famous author on creativity – writing about ‘What to do with your feelings‘ mentions in particular the issue of courage. “People often ask me how I got the courage to put my work into the world. I’m not sure I have any courage, but I do have rage.”
He continues explaining how anger can be channeled in an useful emotion (although this requires quite some control) in a situation where there is a need to react to something out there which is not quite right.
“Whenever you are out of ideas, there’s someone, somewhere, with bad ideas that need to be corrected. But you don’t necessarily have to talk about the bad ideas, or take them on directly, you can just articulate the good ideas that cancel them out.”
Anger could thus be the source of positive alchemy, if used right. And it is true that more often than not, ‘courage’ requires ‘rage’ to express itself.
