Everyday Canvas

December 10

For "Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise" 

Prompt: "Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision." Winston Churchill
Use this quote in your Blog entry today.

----

I agree, although the idea behind Churchill’s words is obvious. A question could be, then, can courage exist without fear? I think even a mild form of fear should be there for courage to surface, as you have to fear something to react to it.

That fear need not be a bone-chilling, negative-result-expecting type of a fear, either. For example, if you would think someone in the room was putting down someone else there needlessly, you would verbally defend that second person or at least you would try to change the aggressor’s attention to another subject. This is what I call doing the right thing, since you have feared the second person getting hurt and decided to do something about it. Then, there was that chance that the aggressor could get at you with putdowns, too, and so your reaction became one of courage, also.

Usually, when we say fear, we think about ourselves being harmed. Yet, harm is not a nice thing to happen to any one person, us or others. And the decision to defend the harmed always shows courage, regardless of the intensity of the fear or the degree of the destructibility of the event that evoked the fear.

Thus, the word fear, rather than the fright that freezes and rends a person helpless, becomes more like a reaction as a reason or catalyst to act.

For: "Space Blog" 

Prompt: deemac ’s "The Old Farmhouse" 
What kind of house did you grow up in? Tell us about it.

----

The house I grew up in was an old, wood-frame, three-story house. The memory of its first floor still impresses me.

The entrance hallway had a high ceiling that cut off a good chunk of the second floor. The floor on the entrance hall was of stone and as big as a big bedroom. Since it was cooler than the other parts of the house, my mother put a sofa and chairs there to turn it into a living space during the hot summer days.

The second place in this house that wasn’t ordinary was the kitchen. It had a large hearth, gas stoves, and other kitchen things. It was also very large and became the second half of the ground floor. In addition to the cupboards and other kitchen needs, we had a huge table in the middle with chairs around it that probably could seat 12-16 people. Most of the time, the leaves on the table were dropped, which made the place seem bigger. We always ate in the kitchen even with guests. At one side of the kitchen were two large floor-to-ceiling windows and a door that opened to the backyard.

The other two stories of the house were like the other houses with bathrooms and rooms for living and sleeping.

Years later, the house was razed down and an apartment building was put in its place as had been the fate of all other houses on the street, which turned from a neighborhood of family-owned private residences into something that became mostly commercial. I don’t consider it a neighborhood anymore and I have avoided passing through that street for decades, now.