Being Brave.
Two things in life that fascinate me are books and the idea of bravery. Often times the theme of books is bravery, so it’s a perfect fit especial when you add a fun adventure in there as well.
I recently realized the movie Coraline had a book that was written before the movie came out. I like reading books and comparing them to their movie counterparts.
Coraline was an especially interesting movie to me because it mixed both happy and creepy into one story that wasn’t centered around demons or the usual “scary” things you see in movies. The other thing I found interesting about it was that if you were to watch the movie with smaller children they wouldn’t find “the other place” creepy like adults do.
So I found the book at the library and spent the afternoon reading it. It surprised me to find out how alike the two are. Normally movies are not as true to the books they originally come from. The Coraline movie was pretty close though.
One thing it didn’t talk about in the movie that I loved was a small story Coraline tells the cat. She talks about taking a walk with her dad. They stepped on a wasp nest and he tells her to run. While she runs he stands still and lets the wasps sting him giving her enough time to get away with only one sting. He, on the other hand, ends up with around 60 stings. Her dad also drops his glasses as he runs away from the wasps. As Coraline tells the story she talks about what her dad said afterward.
“And he said that wasn’t brave of him, doing that, just standing there and being stung,” said Coraline to the cat. “It wasn’t brave because he wasn’t scared: it was the only thing he could do. But going back again to get his glasses, when he knew the wasps were there, when he was really scared. That was brave.”
“And why was that?” asked the cat, although it sounded barely interested.
“Because,” she said, “When you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave.”
I love that last line.
Bravery isn’t a lack of fear. If it was it wouldn’t be valued so highly. It doesn’t take much effort to do things you’re not scared of.
Being brave is hard. It’s what you do when you are faced with fear that determines if you are brave or not.
This small scene in Coraline is a great reminder. So often we look at our lives and believe we aren’t brave because things, people, and ideas scare us. We have to remember that there will always be things that scare us but they don’t have to hold us back because being brave is choice you make.
You might be thinking wow that’s an interesting way of putting but that doesn’t help me. I want to be brave but don’t know how. I have an easy thing I do when I need a little boost of bravery. I have talked about this before in a blog post I wrote a while ago. It’s called The Five Second Rule. I’m not talking about how when you were a kid and dropped your gummy bear you’d yell five-second rule and then pop the gummy into your mouth.
(Don’t pretend like you haven’t done that at least once in your life.) This five-second rule is different. The five-second rule works a huge number of things but for now, we’ll just talk about it in the context of being brave. You count backward from Five. Five, Four, Three, Two, One. When you hit one you take action, as in physically move. This keeps your brain from launching a resistance effort against you from the inside. If you are in a situation that requires you to be brave, like for example if you want to talk to someone, stand up to a bully, or try sometime new for the first time the five-second rule is a great tool to help you.
So don’t think of being brave as being fearless. Being brave is acting in spite of fear.
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