Sometimes you hear a line from a movie, and it sticks in your brain forever, and sometimes even shapes your life.

I'm not really a big fan of westerns. But, in The Magnificent Seven, Charles Bronson has an exchange with some children that, as a father, I think of often.

If you haven't seen the movie, well, the story is simple enough. A group of dirt-poor villagers in a remote part of Mexico are regularly brutalized, stolen from, and starved by a group of outlaws, gangsters who regularly rape and pillage small communities like theirs. The villagers have little money, few weapons, and are outnumbered. So they gather what they can, and hire a motley crew of gunfighters to help them fend off the outlaws. They wind up assembling seven of them (hence the title).

The seven gunfighters get to know the villagers, the women and children, and are admired by all for their bravery. In one quiet scene, away from the others, Bronson, in the role of Bernardo O'Reilly, is making preparations for the coming fight, and talking to some of the kids. Then the following exchange takes place:

Village Boy: We're ashamed to live here. Our fathers are cowards.

O'Reilly: Don't you ever say that again about your fathers, because they are not cowards. You think I am brave because I carry a gun?

Well, your fathers are much braver. Because they carry responsibility: for you, your brothers, your sisters, and your mothers. And this responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and it twists them until finally it buries them under the ground. And there's nobody says they have to do this. They do it because they love you, and because they want to.

I have never had this kind of courage. Running a farm, working like a mule every day with no guarantee anything will ever come of it: this is bravery.

I think of that line often.

One day I'll probably write an extended essay on why that line is so important to me. But then, that might just be gilding the lilly.