The Seed of Bravery
Here is something you should know about bravery: It is an ugly thing. I never chose to be brave. In fact, if I could, I would choose a life where I would never have to be brave again. So don’t bother with the admiration and support for people who had to pick up an armour and fight battles that were chosen for them. Instead be aware that bravery is a condition, only meant to be a temporary state against utter hopelessness in oppression and death. Yet, there are people who live their entire lives being brave.
I love a good fantasy movie or book. Even as an almost-thirty-year-old woman, I will gladly watch a good fantasy adventure over any oscar-nominated drama. And I can hear the voice of people who have never enjoyed it, proclaiming that they “just prefer something a bit more realistic”. It is funny, though. I find more truth in Lord of the Rings than in Titanic. Maybe it is because I have never been on a sinking ship or maybe it is because I understand that sometimes you have to carry a responsibility that is heavy enough to break our backs but there is no one else who can do it for us. So I seek the examples of people who do the same; People who fight kings and queens or monsters, in spite of impossible odds.
In To Kill a Mocking Bird by Harper Lee, the character Atticus Finch says,
“Courage is not a man with a gun in his hand. It’s knowing you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.”
Courage and Bravery are synonymous but the difference is that courage is driven by a cause while bravery is to confront a difficult situation without letting fear take a hold of you. The question is why would we ever be brave? It makes no sense to be it. It can lead to harm and loss but, you see, bravery is not about believing that you can succeed. Bravery is just a thing that happens. You can see it in history. Injustice has been confronted over and over again by people who had everything to lose and did but you could not stop them from doing it because bravery is the sprout from a seed that is buried by oppression itself. It is a reaction equal to the action that led to it. Basically, bravery is bound to happen in the same way physics is, and as Newton’s third law dictates:
“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
