None but the Brave

By TAD BARTIMUS

I apologized for being late and explained that the remote back road I'd driven to reach my appointment had been slick in the rain. The woman executive's eyes widened: "You mean you go that way by yourself? You're so brave!"

She caught me flat-footed. "Brave?" I stammered. "Not really."

She continued to stare as if Amelia Earhart had come to life in her office.

"You're the gutsy one," I blurted. "You're in charge of 15 people and handle millions of dollars. I could never do that." It was her turn to blush as she set me to thinking about courage.

Courageis giving yourself permission to risk and fail, to push the limits of your personal comfort zone.

Despite single-lane bridges and hairpin curves on a cliff road seldom wider than a sports utility vehicle, my four-hour roundtrip to her "big" town to buy everything I can't get at my village post office, gas station or general store seems normal. We rural commuters sometimes carry shovels, tow ropes and maybe even a chain saw in case of landslides or fallen trees, and everybody knows the story of the teacher killed by a tumbling boulder while bringing his wife and newborn home from the hospital. But my road is my lifeline; if I want to live here, I have to drive it. That reality pushes back the parameters of my fear.

Courage is most easily recognized as jumping in a river to save a baby or running into a burning building to rescue the person yelling "HELP!" You don't think about it, you just do it, it's instantaneous and instinctive, there's no time to consider consequences.

Other, less obvious braveries are pre-meditated; asking the boss for a raise, standing up in a group and condemning someone for using a racial, ethnic or religious slur; applying for a scholarship that seems far out of reach; rejecting drugs and alcohol when "oh, come on, everybody else at school does it." These deliberate acts often involve putting personal principles on the line. It's one thing to be philosophically opposed to child abuse; it's another to actually stop somebody in a grocery store from continuing to hurt a child.

"Courage," says a friend who finds herself single for the first time in 25 years, "is giving yourself permission to risk and fail, to push the limits of your personal comfort zone." This woman fearlessly rides motorcycles and argues legal cases before judges but has to force herself to walk alone into a party.

My friend whose two-year-old daughter is going blind is brave as she tries to raise her child to be happy and well adjusted. The mother determinedly submerges her own pain so that each moment her child sees will become a vivid memory to hold onto when the world goes dark.

My friend who's just been diagnosed with breast cancer is brave as she quietly assesses her options while caring for a spouse recovering from spinal surgery. Instead of railing against fate, she is realistically dealing with the crisis. So is a friend with Alzheimer's disease who's calmly putting her affairs in order as she confronts the possibility of losing her mind.

My benchmark of bravery is the image of a frail woman clutching a sweater around her shivering shoulders in a March wind. My mother managed to blink back tears and wave good-bye as I drove away following my father's funeral. After 54 years with the man she loved she had to go on alone. Compared to that, a narrow country road and everything else in my life -- is a piece of cake.

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