Sunday, November 6, 2011

TLU: I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means...

Random kid: "Why are you crossing the bridge; aren't you brave enough to come down here!"
Me: "Plenty brave. Just not an idiot"

Soooooooo... there's this, well, I guess creek that used to run down to the lake. It was dredged each year or so such that it was deep and fast moving to ensure the water passed quickly through it from the swampland out to the lake to manage the runoff. In the winter, kids liked to play on it when no one was looking. I say "when no one was looking" because their parents would ground them for a month if they caught them on it for the very simple reason that the things that made it great for moving water in the spring also saw to it that it didn't freeze to ground in the winter, that you'd get soft spots in the ice from the flow rate, and if you went through you'd be downstream from the hole so fast the next time you'd be seen was when they were pulling your corpse out of the lake in the spring. I was old enough to have been around when it last happened. Them, not so much.

It's conversations like that that remind me that bravery is not about doing things that would get you killed - that's just idiocy or thrill seeking - but instead about doing the thing anyone in their right mind would turn and run from because it's what needs to be done.

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