Discipline as the ground of courage

Martin Luther King Jr. is remembered for what he changed. I want to teach what he practiced, because the practice was the key, and he said so himself.

In 1958, in Stride Toward Freedom, he described the discipline he'd built with the people of Montgomery during the bus boycott, drawn from the teaching of Howard Thurman and from Gandhi: nonviolent direct action. It wasn't a tactic to him. It was a training of the self. You meet hostility without returning it. You hold your ground without raising a hand. You refuse to hate the person in front of you even while refusing to accept what they're doing. And you do that not by feeling calm, but by practicing until you can act calm when you don't feel it.

In 1963, in a jail cell in Birmingham, he wrote a letter to clergy who'd called his actions unwise and untimely, and in it he laid out the four steps of a nonviolent campaign: gather the facts to be sure an injustice exists; negotiate; purify yourself, by which he meant train, through workshops and self-examination, to be sure you can hold the discipline; and only then act. Self-purification before direct action. The inner work was a precondition.

That's the key for the Meaning chamber, and it's about what meaning requires of a person. King's meaning was enormous, and it rested on a daily discipline of the self: prayer, study, the practice of restraint under pressure, the refusal to let what was done to him decide what he'd do. The courage everyone saw was built in private, in the training.

Every key this year has been a small discipline. King's life says the small disciplines are what large meaning stands on.