Bravery is too often confused with adventure and action. Too often, people diminish their own bravery because it might lack the drama of scenery. Bravery is in fact a simple notion: you show bravery when you do something you thought you couldn’t do.
For many, bravery is tapped into when limits are pushed, which of course could mean traveling and putting yourself into an unfamiliar situation. Traveling forces you to question yourself, to see through a new perspective, to feel uncomfortable and to find comfort in the unknown. New places and cultures awaken something inside of us.
But bravery is not only demonstrated by someone who travels somewhere new – it can be found in the simple daily actions of life. A young child learning how to ride a bicycle shows bravery. A teenager asking a crush out on a date shows bravery. A grandparent learning to use new technology to keep up with the grandkids shows bravery. These are all small acts – mere moments in a life – yet they truly demonstrate bravery. They prove to a person that perceived limits can be exceded.
The moment in my life when I felt the need to summon courage and strength, the moment I searched for whatever cape I could possibly don, was in fact the result of travel. But it wasn’t because of travel itself.
It wasn’t when I moved to Ecuador by myself. I didn’t feel the need for bravery when – on my first day of classes as the only American in the entire university – my professor ranted about American policies and foreign relations to a classroom filled with angry youth planning city-wide demonstrations for that very afternoon. This was March of 2008, the day after Colombian military forces armed and trained by the U.S. military had bombed a FARC camp inside Ecuadorian borders.
He finally cut himself off mid-rant when he realized a Gringa had actually infiltrated his classroom.
“Who the hell are you?”
“I’m your new student, Professor. Here to study for the semester,” I replied in my still-nascent Spanish.
“Where are you from?” his face was still red from his rant; perspiration shone on his balding head.
I looked around quickly, knowing that I could lie and then have to maintain that lie for the remainder of the semester, or I could answer truthfully and hope the room didn’t erupt and string me up by my thumbs. I opted for honesty.
“I’m from the United States, Professor.”
I have never seen a man laugh so hard in all my life.
His already purple-tinged face turned scarlet and his features contorted so much that the entire room laughed with him. He finally stopped laughing long enough to demand that I join him at the front of the room to introduce myself and answer questions about my country. I didn’t feel the need for bravery here, only the need to connect with strangers and to demonstrate understanding and empathy.
I didn’t feel the need for bravery when I traveled to Costa Rica to try surfing, nor when I traveled to Jamaica to run a marathon, and certainly not when I traveled to Italy to try to drink my weight in wine.
I didn’t feel the need for bravery when I decided to backpack through Honduras and Guatemala by myself. For me, following my wanderlust was easy, not brave. But it was in Honduras that I was finally faced with a moment that required me to be brave. That moment was when I allowed someone else to impact my life. The moment when I finally felt the need to be brave was the moment I realized I’d fallen in love.
Bravery is neither for the boldest nor wildest among us, it is for each of us to employ as needed.
I had pushed away relationships for so long, fearing that they would hold me back from a life of adventures. I actively chose not to fall in love for years. My first act of true bravery was taking down those fearfully constructed walls and allowing someone to share all of those adventures with me.
Many claim that I was brave to come to Honduras by myself; they say that I was brave to travel alone and to seek adventure and new challenges. What truly happened was that I selfishly wanted adventure and instead learned a lesson in vulnerability. Falling in love requires a vulnerability that can make even the bravest of all adventurous explorers weak in the knees.
Falling in love is the confluence of bravery and vulnerability, a river I am still happily floating down today.
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