On courage, the absurdity of overthinking love.

There comes a moment in a man’s life when, after years of mistaking movement for courage and philosophy for wisdom, he must confront a far simpler and more humiliating truth: that he has been brave in nearly everything—except with his own heart.

I had never truly paused to consider it before—never held the thought up to the light long enough to see its shape. Yet now that it stands before me, naked and undeniable, I must confess: I am a coward.

The confession surprises me, for my life, when observed from a distance, might suggest otherwise. Have I not taken risks? Have I not walked willingly into uncertainty more times than a prudent man ought to? I have gambled with money—yes, with real money, the kind that carries the weight of one’s labor and dignity. I invested in the dreams of friends, believing in their ventures with the naïve sincerity of a man who prefers hope to suspicion. Some of that money vanished, of course, swallowed by the quiet indifference of failed enterprises. Yet even then I did not shrink from the loss; I accepted it almost calmly, as if such wounds were merely the natural toll one pays for believing in something.

And travel! I have hurled myself across continents with little more than determination and a restless spirit. I drove across the long spine of Africa—through the open skies of South Africa, the quiet vastness of Botswana, the heat of Zambia, the winding distances of Tanzania—until at last I arrived in Rwanda. It was a journey filled with uncertainty, with roads that seemed determined to disappear beneath the wheels, with borders and officials and the ever-present whisper of danger. Yet I felt no cowardice then. On the contrary, there was even a certain exhilaration in it, a kind of boldness that one might mistake for courage.

Even socially—politically, if one wishes to exaggerate a little—I have not been entirely timid. I have spoken when it was inconvenient to speak, disagreed when silence would have been easier. Not dramatically, not heroically perhaps, but sufficiently to convince myself that I was, in some modest sense, a brave man.

But all this—every investment, every mile traveled, every small defiance—was merely a rehearsal, a harmless theater of risk. For none of these required the one thing I have always withheld: my heart.

It is there, precisely there, that my courage dissolves like mist.

What is most humiliating is not merely the fear itself, but the elaborate machinery of thought I construct to disguise it. I cloak my cowardice in philosophy, in reflection, in what I pretend is wisdom. Endless considerations parade through my mind, each one demanding to be weighed, examined, reconsidered. Days pass, sometimes months, in this quiet tribunal of doubts. But if I am honest—and tonight I feel compelled to be honest—this is nothing more than procrastination wearing the mask of intellect.

I tell myself that I fear the unknown. That is respectable, almost reasonable. Who does not fear the unknown? Yet beneath that lies an even more shameful suspicion: perhaps I fear the possibility that I might actually obtain what I claim to desire. Perhaps I do not know whether I truly want the outcome of the risk.

And so I retreat into convenient maxims, those tidy little phrases that appear profound precisely because they allow us to avoid action. One such thought has accompanied me lately: Never allow loneliness to drive you into the arms of someone you know you do not belong with.

How wise it sounds! How dignified, how careful! One could repeat such a sentence indefinitely and feel oneself a man of discernment.

Yet when I examine it more closely, the phrase collapses into absurdity.

How does one know who one belongs with? Is there some secret mark upon the soul that reveals such a thing? Do two people meet and immediately perceive the invisible geometry of their destinies aligning? And even if they did—what prevents either of them from changing their minds tomorrow, or next year, or ten years hence?

Human beings are not monuments carved in stone; they are weather, they are rivers, they are restless contradictions. To belong to someone today does not guarantee belonging tomorrow.

So what remains of my careful philosophy then? Very little, I’m afraid.

Perhaps the true problem is not the intensity of my love—nor even the absence of it—but the quality of the people I choose to love, or perhaps the quality of the love itself. Perhaps I search for certainty where only risk can exist. Perhaps I demand guarantees in a realm where guarantees are not merely rare but fundamentally impossible.

And yet knowing this does not resolve the matter. Awareness, cruelly enough, is not the same as courage.

For I may now recognize my cowardice with perfect clarity, may even articulate it with humiliating precision—but still the question remains, stubborn and unresolved:

What is a coward to do with his heart once he finally realizes he has one?

It is a strange fate to travel across countries, gamble with money, argue with ideas—and yet tremble at the thought of asking someone to dinner. But perhaps tomorrow I will correct this small tragedy.