One-A-Day Courage III

One-A-Day Courage
Final episode (part three of three parts)

The year went on. Every day was a challenge, a triumph. I parallel-parked the car. I learned to read maps. I jumped on a trampoline. I started the charcoal by myself.

I helped drive to Colorado on our vacation. It was May, and the Rockies were awash in greens: dark green pines, mint green aspen, lush green meadows. Surely the phrase “crisp and clear” was coined on a spring day in the high country.

“Here!” my husband called. “We can get in on this side!” The excitement in his voice brought Lynn and me running hand-in-hand. We were exploring a ghost town, one of many old mining settlements scattered throughout the Rockies. This one boasted a fine, two-story brick house, still standing tall and proud against decades of harsh mountain weather. The ground around its stone foundation hadn’t fared so well. A log was thrown across the four-foot gap between house and terra firma.

My husband was delighted with the precarious walkway. He scooped Lynn into his arms and walked the log with intimidating confidence.

I stood, paralyzed, alone on a far shore as husband and child disappeared. There, on the log, planted squarely between my safety and my loved ones, stood fear.

“This will be it for the day,” I told myself. “If I walk this log, I don’t have to do anything else that bothers me for the rest of the day. All I have to do is walk to that door.”

I summoned up five months of little victories. Looking directly at the doorway, as though fear were some autonomous being and my focused sight the laser that would disintegrate it, I walked across the log. When I reached the door, fear did, in fact, disintegrate.

I’ve lived some eventful decades since then. I’ve been active in small, medium and large businesses, learned to travel with and without companions, worked in political campaigns; I’ve camped, driven and shopped across the continent. I’ve had times when I was afraid of my surroundings, and times when I was afraid for my livelihood, and even times when I was afraid for my life.

But never once, in all these years since walking my Rocky Mountain log, have I been afraid to live. “This will be it for the day,” I tell myself. “All I have to do is walk to the door.” And so, looking directly at the doorway, I walk across the day’s log.

It’s a funny thing, but every time I reach that door, fear does, in fact, disintegrate.

-end-