Is courage just the awareness that gestures, journeys, lives have intrinsic shape, and must, one way or another, be completed? That there is a path to be followed, literally to the death? Awareness is harsh but better than being unaware, never sensing a path. Better than a life of stunts, false starts, dead ends. Better than the irredeemable ugliness of the halfhearted. Better than feeling there is no shape to anything. There is. The world knows itself.

-Peter Behrens, The Law of Dreams