Brave

“Be on the watch. The gods will offer you chances, know them. Take them.”

Charles Bukowski (The laughing heart) 

I never wanted to travel. That sounds like a weird thing for someone who keeps travelling to say but I hated it. I hated the change, I hated thinking about how anxious I was going to feel and how hard it was going to be. I was never really a brave person. Never the first to go down the slide as a kid, never one to tell people how I truly felt. Probably the main reason I decided to leave home was because I wanted to be brave. I wanted to be the kind of person who could travel alone and fall asleep in a tent underneath the stars. no wifi, no people, no security. I didn’t want to be high maintenance or neurotic, words I’d become all too familiar with.

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And so off I went, first to university in England, then America, Europe, Asia, Australia and now New Zealand. Each time the trip getting a little more adventurous, a little more daring. Each time pushing my comfort zone bigger and bigger, welcoming in new people, doing things that even I could never have imagined doing. And still, when I looked in the mirror after each adventure the same cautious girl was always looking back. I was still lying in bed over thinking at night, my palms were still sweating uncontrollably. And when I thought about doing something new, I was still afraid. Change still petrified me. Travel still intimidated me.

You see bravery wasn’t some prize I collected at the end of each adventure. I had done things that people called brave, but I wasn’t brave. I never would be. It wasn’t a personality trait I could acquire. It wasn’t a goal I could achieve. It was a choice. And it was a choice that I had to keep making every single day. Not once. Not for that first trip. Not the choice to leap out of that plane but rather the knowledge that every time the opportunity was presented to me, I would always jump. That I would always choose the hard decision when I knew it was also the right one. That I would always chase the big love, the kind that threatens to tear us up and spit us out. That I would always choose truth even when it was so hard to speak it. That I would always choose opportunity.

I would always choose bravery.

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All my love

Maeve