When Courage Wears a Different Face (Fear, Faith and a Tank in the Red)
Sometimes faith is as small as a whisper, and just enough to keep the wheels turning.
Dear Gran,
I set off just after sunrise, the air still cool enough to make me question why on earth I was doing this again. Six hours alone on a scooter across Flores, on a road that looks like it was designed by a drunk snake. I strapped the box to the back of the Scoopy, said a small prayer to both God and the bungee cords, and pulled out of Labuan Bajo towards Lehong.
‘Main road’ means something entirely different here. Back home, it’s lanes and service stations, maybe a Costa every fifteen minutes. Here, it’s hairpin bends that vanish into the mountains, edges that crumble away, and long stretches where the only moving thing is the shadow of a bird. You can drive for half an hour without seeing a single house, just the green rising and folding into itself, as if the earth were breathing.
When the Petrol Gauge Turns Red
Somewhere between Ruteng and the middle of nowhere, my petrol gauge dipped into red. It’s always the same little jolt: sweaty palms, quick heartbeat, the whispered bargains. Please, God, just one more roadside seller. I promise I won’t let it get this low again. Of course, I always do. There’s a particular kind of faith required here, not the sort sung about in hymns, but the everyday kind that trusts there’ll be an Aqua bottle of petrol waiting somewhere up ahead.
The Fear That Follows me
It struck me then that this — not standing on stages or pitching to clients — is what courage looks like for me. This, apparently, I can do: strap my life to a scooter, point myself at the horizon, and just go. Yet the idea of sending an outreach email, of saying I can help you, I’m good at this, stops me cold.
It’s absurd, really. I’ll ride six hours across mountains with a dodgy fuel gauge and questionable footwear, but ask me to put myself out there as a ghostwriter and I’m suddenly eighteen again, hearing my headmistress declare I was the one “least likely to succeed.”
Echoes of ‘Not Good Enough’
That sentence still echoes, even after the Navy handed me the Raleigh Medal for being their most outstanding recruit. The world says you did it, and my brain replies, are you sure?
I’ve spent forty years trying to prove I belong in every room I enter, and even when I’m standing there, part of me still feels like the girl who snuck past the security guard.
But that voice doesn’t follow me on the road; maybe it can’t keep up. Out here, there’s no Wi-Fi, no metrics, no quiet hum of other people’s success stories. Just mountains that couldn’t care less who you are, and a road that keeps asking only one question: will you keep going?
Where Faith Rides Beside Me
Usually, that’s when the fear shifts. The panic over the petrol turns into something else, an odd, grateful awareness that I’m still moving. My hands dry, the road opens out, and I feel it again, that presence. Not in the church-pew sense, but the bone-deep knowing that I’m not alone. I catch myself smiling, whispering thank-yous into my helmet, because really, who gets to live like this?
There are moments that undo me completely, a break in the trees where light floods a valley, or the smell of wet rice fields after rain. My heart does this ridiculous skip, like it’s remembering joy all over again. And just when I start to get sentimental, a lorry overtakes on a blind corner and I’m reminded that faith is one thing, but so are brakes.
Between Fear and Faith
Maybe that’s what courage really is, Gran. Not the absence of fear, but the choice to keep moving even when the gauge is in the red, trusting there’ll be enough, that you’ll be enough. I used to think courage looked like medals and milestones, the kind of bravery that earns applause. Now I think it’s quieter than that, whispering please, God and turning the throttle anyway.
Every journey feels like a conversation between fear and faith. Fear says what if I can’t? and faith answers you already are. Somewhere between those two voices, life happens, messy, miraculous, full of dust and gratitude.
The Taste of Autumn, Half a World Away
The road dipped into shadow, and the ground was littered with brown leaves. For a moment, I could have sworn I was back in England, somewhere damp and familiar, a smell of woodsmoke I couldn’t quite place. I could taste autumn in the air, though I couldn’t have told you what it tasted of. It was fleeting, but it made me ache for home, for here, for everything that brought me to this strange, beautiful in-between life.
The Quiet Road Home
A woman waved me down not long after, selling petrol in old Aqua bottles. She looked surprised when I spoke to her in Bahasa Indonesian, more surprised still when she realised I was alone. We both laughed at that: me, the ridiculous foreigner on a scooter; her, the calm assurance that I’d make it home.
Maybe courage isn’t about being fearless at all. Perhaps it’s about keeping faith in the next stretch of road, and the unseen hands that always, somehow, guide me through.
From the quiet road home, grateful for both the fear and the faith.
