CALLING COUR AGE
I’m not sure if you’ve realised this, but I just did. In the past month or so, this magazine has become a platform for one theme – courage. It wasn’t a deliberate blueprint we at Friday aimed to create. It was completely inadvertent; just that courage, I now think, makes for a great story.
Whether it was the August 31 issue’s cover story on Fahad Al Hammadi, the little boy who fought his fear of water and has now become an accomplished swimmer, or last week’s cover story on three mums of autistic kids, who decided to look beyond their children’s condition and focus on their talents – each of these articles offers inspiration to us, us who quite often become a bit selfish in our sorrows.
This week, too, courage continues to be the predominant theme. It is reflected not in one but two of the features.
The first is on 22-year-old Marwa Al Mamari’s painful battle with a heart condition that led to a heart transplant in 2015, and her miraculous yet tedious recovery since (page 20). And the second is an interview with Rebecca Farrar-Hockley, shoe giant Kurt Geiger’s firecracker chief creative officer, on page 32. In the whimsical world of high fashion where glamour has a very constricting definition, Rebecca has shown courage by giving comfort a more vital role in her designs.
Both these features, just like numerous others that have graced this magazine, prove that whatever battle we are fighting in our personal lives – whether it is the paralytic power of fear or big and small stumbling blocks that are called adversity –
As Nelson Mandela once said, courage is not the absence of fear but the triumph over it. The brave man is he who conquers that fear
courage is the only weapon we have. That is probably also the reason why these features resonate with all of us.
As Nelson Mandela once said, courage is not the absence of fear but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear. I could not agree more, for I believe living with fear is a life not lived. It is merely a fractured, weak and unfulfilled existence.