Thought about Courage

Here's a thought:

"It takes as much courage to try and fail
as it takes to try and succeed"

It made me think about this whole looking-for-a-flat adventure that we've been on for a week now. Last week I had to make my first call in German to ask an unknown person for a flat he was offering. Without any previous knowledge about how such a call is made I dreaded the whole thing for at least half-an-hour. When I finally made the call, it went fairly smoothly. But the thinking before it, "If I say this and they answer that, what do I say then?", "What if they don't understand what I'm saying?" and the more I thought about it, the more I was certain that something would not work. And when I made the call, I could find out all I needed. The person on the other end of the line actually wanted to help me in renting the apartment! Who could have seen that?

Since then I've made several of those phone calls and I'm also getting quite good at going through the classified ads for suitably situated, reasonably priced and big enough apartments. I go through all the ads and mark the ones that fit the description and then Virpi uses a tighter comb to select the few candidates that we call. The net has been getting tighter and tighter during the week. Soon we won't accept anything outside the ring road in Bochum center (diameter of maybe 700m).

But anyway, to try I needed a lot of courage. And I used it to succeed. I might have failed, although thinking about it with hindsight, I don't see how.