“Live your life so that the fear of death can never enter your heart,” – Teach Different with Chief Tecumseh of the Shawnee Nation – Living Without a Fearful Heart

Transcript

Dan Fouts (00:10)

Welcome everybody to the Teach Different podcast. We got an awesome quote today in celebration of Native American Heritage Month. And our quote is from Chief Tecumseh from the Shawnee Nation, who’s got some interesting words of wisdom for all of us that hopefully we can apply to our own life and at the same time, appreciate on its own as it relates to Native American culture. We’ll get to the quote in a minute. It’s a deep one. But before we do, for those unfamiliar with the Teach Different method, we’re gonna share this profound quote and we’re gonna look at the claim and try to interpret it and see what it means, right? What it means to us given our personal experiences and how we can connect it to our life while at the same time appreciating what it must have meant for the person saying it. There’s a nice little magical balance there that we like to strike. And then we’ll look at the counterclaim, push against it. It’s words of wisdom, but there’s also words of wisdom on the other side. And the critical thinking piece is important to create that tension for our conversation. And then we’ll sprinkle in a couple of questions. And this is gonna be a Teach Different short podcast. So we’re gonna go maybe 10, 15 minutes tops, and we’ll get in, get out and give you something useful that you can use wherever you use this method. The classroom, the home, the business, the organization, whatever. So with that, here you go. Chief Tecumseh of the Shawnee Nation, I’ll read it twice. Live your life so that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Live your life so that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Steve, what do you think the claim is to you?

Steve Fouts (02:08)

Don’t live your life under fear of death. What’s important about life is your knowledge of who you are and what you need to do and your physical, you know, existence is already transitory, right? We’re all going to live and die. We already know that. So if you’re going to be living and spending your life fearing death, it’s going to get in the way of other important things about life.

and what it is that you really should be thinking about. So just don’t get carried away by that. Allow reality to take care of the length of your life. Worry about the quality of your life.

Dan Fouts (03:00)

Worry about the quality of your life, not the fear of death. Don’t think about the end, think about the process that you’re a part of. The word fear here, and I know he applies it to death, live your life so that the fear of death can never enter your heart. But I really think that that idea of fear, when you think about the impact that fear has on our lives, not just over death, but over anything else. If you fear something, you’re hesitant. If you’re hesitant, you’re like that worm that’s on the ground that doubles up and contracts instead of expanding. And if you live your life that way, you’re gonna make poor decisions. You’re gonna make decisions based on fear. You’re gonna enter relationships based on fear. You’re gonna go into the job place based on fear. And it’s gonna infect everything you do. So I really like this. This is very inspirational.

Steve Fouts (04:09)

It’s good. And I’m going to take the word heart too, and read into that real quick before we hit the counterclaim. Live your life so that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Your heart is where your, I think, your morality is your spirit, how you treat other people, your compassion. All the things that are really important about human beings and what makes us human and allows us to get along and the real connection that we have. If you’re worried about your own life, you’re not tapping into that heart. And when you don’t tap into the heart, you become an individual and you’re apart from the community and you get estranged and you’re not thinking of yourself as one of a larger whole, you’re just forgetting the important things. So the heart, think, is a big word here too.

Dan Fouts (05:12)

Yeah, that’s great. It’s weird, I almost missed that, the heart at the end. It’s almost positioning the heart as the center of the self, not the brain. A lot of people might say, live your life so that the fear of death can never enter your mind. That would be, I think, more of a Western way of looking at this. But again, this is Native American culture. The heart makes so much more sense in light of that. And I really like that.

Steve (05:49)

Because a selfish heart worries about their physical life. That’s just thinking that your own body is what’s important. And that’s where it goes astray. That’s where you’re not thinking of the whole. Okay, but let’s do the counterclaim, right? What is the counterclaim to this? Live your life so that the fear of death can never enter your heart. I would start off and say having a fear of death and having that be part of something that truly means something to you and something that you’re not thinking of it selfishly, you’re afraid of death maybe for other people. And I’ll give you an example. If you’re a parent and maybe you got diagnosed with something, a frail, a disease or something, and you know that your time might be more limited than you originally thought, having a little fear of that happening. The reason you would was because there’s people depending on you and you have to not pretend like it’s not true. You want to take care of people. So you’re going to, you know, utilize that awareness and maybe that’s some of that fear and maybe even share some of that with your loved ones. And that’s going to be important for them to know how to go on perhaps, you know, when you’re gone. So there’s an example of a counterclaim.

Dan Fouts (07:38)

Picking up on the word never, this is quite a dramatic statement. Live your life so that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Well, maybe if it does enter your heart a little bit, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. A fear of death or an awareness that you’re going to die, if it enters your heart, and impacts how you feel and how you treat others, it might make life more immediately valuable to you, more immediately special and important, a little bit of a fear of death. If you just gloss it over and you live kind of a blissful, ignorance about death and you’re never thinking about it and it’s never part of you, well then maybe you’re not living a truly human life. I’m trying to go against this a little bit. So maybe never enter your heart. Maybe there’s a, again, balance. This is where maybe there’s a little bit of both that can be part of living a good life.

Steve Fouts  (08:56)

And again, I’m gonna go back to this idea of people who depend on you. If you have people depending on you and you have an opportunity to go skydiving without a parachute and they’re going to show you how once you jump out of the plane, you can go find the person that has the parachute and they’ll show you how to fly to them. And they’re saying, come on, let’s go. Don’t be afraid of death. It’s just not, it’s something that you have to be considering to keep yourself safe. And it doesn’t have to be a selfish thing.

Dan Fouts (09:38)

And maybe to put this in historical context, you know, Chief Tecumseh fought in the war of 1812 with the British against the Americans, a newly formed nation. This may have been a statement given to warriors of the Shawnee tribe. You know, I get it. Live your life so that the fear of death can never enter your heart. How do you defend your culture without embracing this wisdom? So again, this is where putting this in a historical context is an interesting way of interpreting the quote. But as Steve and I are doing here, we’re bringing it more to a personal level and whether it’s true on that sense. Very versatile, very versatile.

Steve Fouts (10:25)

Maybe an essential question would be, are there certain people who can’t let fear of death enter their heart to do their role?

Dan Fouts (10:40)

Who, building on that Steve, for whom is this quote most relevant? That would be interesting. Students or if you’re doing this in your family, your son or daughter, to talk about who should really live like this and who shouldn’t and why. What’s the criteria you would use for embracing this quote? Love it.

Steve Fouts (11:11)

Yeah, good stuff.

Dan Fouts (11:13)

Okay, great. Chief Tecumseh, the Shawnee Nation, some outstanding wisdom, things to think about related to death and courage and heart. Live your life so that the fear of death can never enter your heart in honor of Native American Heritage Month. All right, until next time on the Teach Different podcast, take care everybody.