Ice Trucking

In my dream, I am driving our truck. My husband is driving something else and we are side by side on a two-lane road. We come to a stop. My lane goes forward and his goes to the left. I watch him drive away and then I gently step on the gas to move forward. The road becomes thickly ice-covered. The ice is pebbly like it has melted and refrozen many times and each time picked up hundreds of rocks. I begin to wonder if the road is still a road or if it is something else. I drive for a short way and then stop. I look in the sideview mirror and I see a huge rolling wave of ice coming toward the back of the truck. The wave crashes over the truck and I wake up saying ah, ah, ah, and seeing the last light through the ice.

I suppose driving the truck down a road that turned to ice could be considered bold or it could simply be a mistake, a miscalculation. In real life, I can see making a decision to drive for a bit on pebbly ice and then hitting the brakes and backing up when I realized what might happen next.

Living boldly means getting in the truck and driving it down the road even though a million catastrophic scenarios may come to mind, not the least of which is falling through the ice and drowning.

Boldness is the daily overcoming of our own wild imaginations. It’s not the magnificently heroic things that people do – those things are courageous and brave. Being bold means refusing to be trapped by the potential for mistake or failure. It means digesting whole the times of criticism and defeat and then getting back in the truck and finding a new road to drive.

I know this from my dreams and from my experience.

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Written in response to the #bloganuary prompt: What does it mean to live boldly?

Photo by Irina Shishkina on Unsplash