What it means to be brave,

“The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet not withstanding go out to meet it.”

As someone who has recently picked up and moved herself as far away as geographically possible on a one-way ticket down under, I’d have to say the most common and frequent word I hear these days is “brave.”

Whether it is a complete stranger curious about what bought me to Australia, or my very best friend in any one of her constant WhatsAp reminders, it always strikes a chord deep within me. “Brave.” … “You’re so brave!” … “That takes such bravery.” … I never understood the word choice, at least not in my particular context. What is so brave about wanting to do something and simply doing it? Everyone keeps asking me why I moved to Australia, or Wollongong, and no matter how many times I respond with ‘because I just wanted to!’ it doesn’t seem to get my intentions across. 

Maybe the word doesn’t sit right with me because of the way it is defined (and maybe that’s an English teacher thing): to act courageously, not deterred by fear, danger or pain. Travel doesn’t scare me. Packing my life into one single bag and flying nearly 10,000 miles away from home with no job, no house, no real contacts, no plan, it doesn’t evoke even a single ounce of fear in me. I don’t believe living out of a bag, pond-hopping, or inventing brand new lives for myself every few months or years is dangerous. There has never been anything in any of my worldly adventures which caused me pain, and if I ever started to feel that, it is literally as simple as packing up and moving on once again. None of this makes me brave, because I can’t think of a single thing that might deter me from this wandering path.

I think there may have been other things in my life I have done which I might have considered brave… I moved out when I was 18 years old, and never returned to live with or depend on my parents for longer than a handful of months between travels; even through university I made my own independent life throughout my summers, sometimes choosing to live completely alone. But I’m not sure that made me brave, maybe just more self-sufficient.

I moved home from England and quit my very first fulltime teaching job. At first glance that may make me seem weak or foolish. Maybe it does make me those things. My life there just didn’t make me happy enough, so I ended it. But even that wasn’t about being brave, it was simply about being smart and being selfish and putting my happiness and my mental well-being first.

A couple of years back, I lost someone very special to me. His mere existence had the strongest effect on me for years. Being in his presence was powerful and dangerous and magnificent; all-encompassing. And then one day, wandering through Trafalgar Square in London, England, I got the news from back home that he had suddenly passed. Those were the hardest days, the toughest months, at points & times through that first year especially, life seemed impossible. I think maybe something in there made me braver. But I’m still not really sure what…

The notion simply puzzles me. I can’t understand what makes an exciting life a brave one. Or why chasing your dreams has to be correlated with conquering fears and challenging danger. Why does living free-spiritually even require courage? And what exactly is the appropriate, gracious response when people call you that big B-word? Especially when you feel like an absolute phony for accepting it as some sort of ill-placed compliment.

And then yesterday, for the first time in my whole recollection of life, I felt the strongest surge of bravery. I felt fear, I felt danger, I felt consequence, I felt intimidation, and I felt uncertainty … but I never felt panic. And in that, in that moment yesterday, in my lack of alarm, I felt so clearly and distinctly brave. I have never felt this before, and it overtook me even more strongly than the massive wave that was roaring towards me about to break right overtop of me: the very thing that inspired this feeling.

The only way I can describe surfing is that it is a sport for the brave. As someone who was never keen on swimming, or being under the water, or large underwater mammals, I feel exceptionally brave for taking on this newest of hobbies. But again, I never went into it thinking it would make me brave! I knew I loved the lifestyle, I loved the workout of it, I loved the feel-good, easy-riding, free-spirit vibes I got from every surfer I’d met here so far. It felt natural for me, and I’ve picked it up quite impressively for a newbie!

But it wasn’t until a few lessons in, waves heaps bigger and faster, relentless, restless, that I began to realize the sheer immensity of the ocean. And yes, that sounds silly and naïve, but you don’t actually understand just how wild that water is, how completely uncontrollable and even unpredictable it can be, until you are smack-dab in the middle of it and there is nothing out there to protect you from what force it might have over you. One minute it is rolling waves, the next it is approaching its break so hard and so fast over your board and the only shot you’ve got to avoid how dangerously strong that crash can be is to paddle directly into that oncoming, surmounting, swelling wall of water. And I’ll tell you, this is no easy task. It is literally a beast; I don’t know how else to describe it.

With the perfect approaching wave, when you know you’ve no time to flip and catch its ride, you have about 3 nanoseconds to remind yourself of two things: 1) there is absolutely not a single way to avoid this. This is your exact current moment: it is coming, you cannot change or escape what is about to happen to you in the next mere seconds. It is what it is. There is nothing else to do but accept that and take what’s coming (and in this particular nanosecond, you are always anticipating the worst). And 2) take the deepest breath you have ever inhaled. And then you just let it hit you, you let it crash on over you, you let it drag you under, you let it wrestle with your body and your board and the leash connecting those two things. You take that heavy slap of water to the face, no matter how hard you try to push yourself up over the wave, you let it conquer you; you succumb to total, disillusioned, temporarily-disoriented defeat.

And then you wipe your eyes and you spit the salt and you simply continue on paddling outwards, further from the shore, deeper into the growing, growling, rumbling distant ripples, and you wait for the next round of you vs. mother nature (already knowing its outcome). You get your belly back on that board and you keep on pushing yourself out, again and again, day after day.

I reckon that is bravery.