Montaigne comes back to the question of cowardice quite a bit and starts his examination by questioning whether people should be punished for weakness or cruelty. Fair enough — but he glosses over a definitional issue that I think is more important.

Most of what we term cowardice, in my opinion, is not about weakness at all. People will be labeled cowards, or self-label themselves as such, for not taking action to achieve something they really want or to continue on a path they generally find unfulfilling. But notice how that view does not include the typical view of a coward as someone who refuses to fight.

In truth, someone who refuses to fight is only being weak if he or she actually agrees with the cause of fighting and just refuses to be personally responsible for the outcome. That is true cowardice. But someone who evades fighting a war they disagree with isn’t being cowardly, they are standing up for their values.

And likewise, people who do not take action to achieve something they desire are not taking this action in isolation. In nearly every instance, they are balancing this desire with another aspect of their life. So, yes, they don’t jump in head-first to pursue that great passion, but they are choosing to stick with a life that must be on some level satisfying. There has to be an element of comfort and safety, or even merely familiarity, that they are protecting, and we should not take such things for granted.

The reason why people self attack over their life choices isn’t because they weakly declined to do something they wanted, they self attack because the actual life trade off of their making creates a life narrative that they find less appealing. They want to be known as someone more daring, romantic or opportunistic.

So our cultural valorizes those who take risks, but we rarely go back and analyze what they gave up along the way — the instability, broken relationships and trust built up in their current jobs and living arrangements. In truth, every decision involves tradeoffs, risks and opportunities on both sides.

Then again, very often life isn’t about one single choice. Taking a route in one aspect of your life could lead you to behave differently and make the opposite choices.

I know that I spent many years vaguely uncomfortable in a relationship and the feeling of being stuck in it. This led me to take risks in other aspects of my life that were ultimately damaging to me and sometimes others. Once I determined that it was in my and everyone else’s best interest to move on from this relationship, the rest of my life calmed down and continues to settle more the greater distance I get from it. I lost the drive to shake things up.

I also found that many of the reasons I told myself at the time — I couldn’t manage all the money issues on my own, my kids will suffer, I can’t possibly live alone, what will friends and family think — proved to be non-issues. This isn’t to say they were non-issues in the moment, though, and it’s very likely that I needed to reach a place in my life where I was able to handle all of the responsibilities before I could choose to move on.

But that doesn’t give me license to demean that earlier version of me as a coward. I was making rational choices based on knowing myself and the issues in front of me. And I’d be a fool to argue that I’ve figured it all out now.

Looking back, my life has the appearance of relative stability. I’ve had the same basic career for my whole adult life. I was in a relationship for nearly 25 years. I’ve now lived in the same city for more than 30 years. But there were a whole lot of zigs and zags going on under the surface and I grew up in a constant state of change, it was closer to normal for me.

So as someone who had to learn to calm down and stay still, I’m not going to judge people for not taking big leaps. Lots of times when you take a big leap you land flat on your face, and then you have to pick yourself up and start over. It builds resilience, to be sure, but it’s not as fun as it’s made out to be.