Post #21: Belgian Spirit and Facing Fear -- Seth Godin's Way

December 5, 2013

A Spot of History: As mentioned in earlier posts, when the Germans conquered Belgium they effectively shut down the country and cut off its seven million people from the rest of the world.

All telephone, telegraph and mail services were shut down, no trains, buses or cars were allowed to run, and travel even between nearby villages was strictly forbidden. Newspapers were circulated but only if they were written or approved by the Germans. And -- in Europe's most industrialized country -- factories and manufacturing plants stood silent.

From

http://www.iwm.org.uk/

In essence, the country was instantly transported back to feudal times.

Later, limited mail and train services were restarted, but travel was permitted only after obtaining a pass from the Germans, and telephones, telegrams and automobiles were never allowed during the more than four years of German occupation.   

Couple those hardships with sky-high unemployment and near famine conditions and it's hard to imagine how the average Belgian coped, let alone fought back. But that's exactly what they did -- the Belgians fought back. Every chance they got, every tiny window of opportunity they saw, they would take if it gave them some slight psychological advantage over their captives.

"The Belgians are prisoners who shame, outwit, and pinprick their gaolers [sp] in a kind of warfare more efficacious than sniping, in which both sexes and all ages have become expert through a merciless apprenticeship," wrote journalist Arthur L. Humphreys in a series of 1915 articles in the London Times entitled The Heart of Belgium.

Humphreys continued, "Should a German officer sit down at the same table in a cafe or restaurant with a Belgian, the Belgian takes another seat. If an officer enters a tram, women draw back so that their garments will not touch his, as if they would escape vermin. One officer who lost his temper on such an occasion exclaimed: 'Madame, I shall not contaminate you!' Her only reply was to look at the officer's coat and draw a little farther away."

Another woman from a small town where the Germans were billeted in homes said that the soldiers "try to be friendly. They say they have wives and children at home, and we say:  'How glad your wives and children would be to see you! Why don't you go home?' "

Prentiss N. Gray, the 1917 CRB assistant director in Brussels, wrote in his
published journal, Fifteen Months in Belgium: A CRB Diary (http://grayresearch.net/page7/page7.html), "The Belgians never tire of telling stories of German stupidity, and as far as I can make out, their fund of stories is endless.... Any discomfort of a German is joy to the Belgian heart."

 E.E. Hunt, war correspondent and one of the first CRB delegates, tells the story in his book, War Bread, that a Flemish peasant applied for a pass at the German Pass Bureau in Antwerp. The German asked the man how long he wanted the pass good for. The Belgian answered: “How long are you Germans going to stay in Belgium?”

Born from fear and raised on daily horrors endured, this Belgian spirit was one of the few things every self-respecting Belgian could cling to without breaking any German rules or regulations.

As related by Rhodes scholar and CRB delegate Emile Hollmann, one Belgian jurist summed it up when he stated: "'We know how to suffer in Belgium, our ability to suffer and to hold fast to our hearths has kept us going through the centuries. Now a ruffian has come into our house and taken us by the throat. He can choke us to death, or he can slowly starve us to death, but he cannot make us yield. No, we shall never forgive!'"

My post: The concept of fear and how it can turn some people into action heroes while transforming others into immoveable mush is fascinating to me.

That's why I want to share a recent blog post about fear from the wise-as-an-old-owl Seth Godin. Here it is in its entirety.

Title: Fear the fear, feel the fear

Most of the things we avoid are avoided because we're afraid of being afraid.

Too meta?

Sorry, but it's true. The negative outcomes that could actually occur due to speaking up in class, caring about our work product, interacting with the boss--there's not a lot of measurable risk. But the fear... the fear can be debilitating, or at the very least, distasteful. So it's easier to just avoid it altogether.

On the other hand, artists and leaders seek out that feeling. They push themselves to the edge, to the place where the fear lives. By feeling it, by exposing themselves to the resistance, they become more alive and do work that they're most proud of.

The fear doesn't care, either way. The choice is to spend our time avoiding that fear or embracing it.

End of  Godin's blog post. For those who want to know more about Seth, his website is at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

As a writer, I'm lucky enough to say that I've never been so fearful that I wasn't able to write. Yes, I have felt the fear that comes from wondering if my writing would be good enough for the topic at hand. And I've been fearful at times that I couldn't complete some of my big book projects.

But I guess I've always embraced Seth's concept. In fact, I now realize that when it comes to writing, I've danced cheek-to-cheek with fear many times -- and her hot breath on my neck can be exciting!

It's kind of like when I played soccer as a kid in New Jersey back in the 1960s. Just before the start of a game, I'd be scared to the point of nearly being sick to my stomach. I was scared that I would screw up, not play well, let my teammates down -- all the usual stuff. But the second the whistle blew, all that would vanish and I'd simply play the game. No internalizing, no angsting -- just running, dribbling, shooting and defending.   

Today, when it comes to my writing, there are those moments away from the research and the computer that I can feel the fear rise, and the questions start: Can I really write the book I'm imagining? Am I a good enough researcher? Am I a good enough writer? Is my aging brain up to the complex challenge?

But all that vanishes the moment I sit back down to the research and my computer. It's as if some internal whistle has just blown, all fear disappears and I simply...play the game.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post. 

End of Post.