There’s a chirpy pop song that came out a while back, where the singer exhorts us to be brave, with uplifting lyrics that seem targeted at anxious kids. They’ve been prattling around in my head lately.
Bravery is a great concept for a song. In real life, it’s a way of life, a dedication to an ideal that, it has to be accepted, may never be reached. This is not to be negative, although negativity has a cautionary, instructive place in life. The daily acts of bravery are in pushing ahead to a goal and then taking that goal and plumping it up like a pillow, making it bigger and making it new again.
Last year I exercised my bravery muscle and quit my job. One fell swoop, a big-bold move. Fade to black, I shook off my corporate handcuffs and lived happily ever after. Except.
Except the thing about an act of bravery is that it didn’t end with the fell swoop, the fade to black. Last week, I had a dream I was back in my old office and I woke up wondering what if I’d stayed there, stayed comfortable. But I know what comfortable did, how it didn’t stop the thoughts that crept in every time I stood at the office coffee maker and thought, I shouldn’t be here. The fell swoop was easy. The months that have followed have been the place where the question of bravery is answered, or ignored.
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When I looked up bravery in Google images, I see a lot of photos of soldiers, people jumping off things, inspirational quotes on sunny backgrounds. I see people in their big bold acts and I rather want to see them the next morning, and mornings months after. I want to see them when the trickle-down effects of their move is still trickling, unless it isn’t, because they’ve slipped back into comfortable, into the same, into the fear that keeps a creative from creating.
There can be bravery in the comfortable, small acts can be big, small moves can move mountains. But I live in a province where one move can kill a community: one plant closed, one school shuttered. If fear is the opposite of bravery then flexibility and discipline are its siblings.
What I do know is: no pop song gets my friend to put her face on an election sign and run for political office. No pop song gets another friend to come up with an idea for an amazing business that she’s starting with me while raising kids far from family, and no pop song gets me to sit down at my computer and write. That song can swim around my head, it can dance and skip and hop until it’s tired itself out and goes looking for someone else to infect. I’ve done my big bold act and now nothing is braver for all of us than showing up, day after day, and doing the work.