Thanks Eddie.
I can't help but think of the notion of "heart" when hearing the word "courage," since fairly recently (in recent years) I have learned of the etymology of the word "courage". The Latin word cell,
cor "heart," is right there in this word. And, of course, we tend to associate "heart" with love, even though, since William Harvey (1578 – 1657), the heart is generally regarded as little more than a pump for blood.
In light of your comment about Rollo May about courage, and in relation to the traditional association of courage with heart (love, compassion, kindness), I'm contemplating "courage" as having both a personal and a trans-personal aspect. Despair, too, may be personal and/or transpersonal, in this sense. It's a matter of what's at risk and how much one may choose to accept risk, I think. ... this matter of despair.
We're living in an epoch of human history which I think is quite unique to all previous humans. Today, educated people very often wonder if there will even be a human future on this planet. Our very species -- much less the current form of "civilization" -- is rightfully understood by educated people as at risk. Not so long ago, the concept of ecosystems and the biosphere did not even exist! Now that those concepts are becoming very mainstream, at that very historical moment, the whole shebang is at risk.
One might say, then, that in no previous time in history has courage meant quite so much as it does to us -- we who have so much reason for despair, and we with so much reason to love.
Let me explain just a little further. Anyone who has ever loved an infant or a child (or any living being, really) ... for all previous human epochs, has seen and experienced that being as part of a continuum connecting the Deep Ancestral Past with the Deep Ongoing Future. Until recently. In which that connection is strangely disrupted because ... well, for many reasons. But most of all because we are no longer so sure there will be a Deep Ongoing Future.