The Quiet Courage and strength of Staying
In When Giving Up Feels Easier Than Showing Up, we explored how, in those early, chaotic years of fatherhood, it can feel impossibly hard to maintain the activities that once anchored us. Training sessions, hobbies, even meaningful personal rituals—these can all seem like too much effort when every day feels like a storm to weather. The conclusion we drew was clear: this phase isn’t about perfection. It’s about showing up, however imperfectly.
Building on that central idea, let’s turn our attention to a different form of showing up. One that doesn’t get as much credit. The kind that looks less like action and more like presence. It’s the quiet courage and strength of staying.
Staying in the room when a child won’t stop crying and there’s nothing left to do.
Staying patient when we’re at the end of our rope.
Staying present when we’re tempted to check out—just for a minute, just for a breath.
The world celebrates the loud, the bold, the action-packed forms of courage. But what about the courage to simply remain? The courage to sit with discomfort, to resist the urge to run, to keep being there even when it feels easier to give up?
This quiet courage is no less vital than the overt, visible kind. In fact, it’s the bedrock upon which that visible courage is built. In When Giving Up Feels Easier Than Showing Up, we found that just continuing to show up in small, steady ways made a difference. The same is true here. Staying—whether it’s staying engaged, staying patient, or staying hopeful—turns out to be a revolutionary act in the context of fatherhood’s relentless demands.
When I first read it, Kent Nerburn’s views on the different kinds of strength in Letters to My Son, really helped me clarify and understand strength in its different forms.
“Every man has a different strength. A man who chooses to live at home with aged parents, or a man who devotes himself to endless hours of labor to learn the violin or the secrets of quantum physics has a quiet strength that few will ever know. A man who masters his own desire for independence and gives himself over to being a kind and loving father is strong in a way that many others could not match, but his strength is never seen. You need to find your own strength”
By staying, we send a message—to our children, to our partners, and to ourselves—that this matters. That they matter. That we matter. It’s not a matter of being perfect or never faltering; it’s about choosing, each time, to continue. It’s about choosing presence over escape. That choice—quiet and unglamorous—carries its own profound power.
It’s not weakness. It’s strength. The quiet kind. The lasting kind.
And this kind of courage doesn’t require us to have all the answers. It simply asks that we stay.