To You Who Doesn’t Feel ‘Brave’

‘Brave as a lion 🦁’

From a first impression, brave would not be a word most people would use to describe Nell.

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You won’t get a ‘normal’ greeting from her i.e. four paws & fluff in your face.⠀

No...if you’re lucky you’ll get more of a suspicious sniff from a social distance 😂 (she clearly listens to The News) before she scurrys away behind the sofa she’s outgrown (and yet insists on folding herself behind like a pretzel 🥨 😂)

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Food is not enough for you to be her friend. Although a hot sausage may momentarily stop her from ducking and dashing it won’t win her heart. Only time will do that.

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Yet after a day or two in her company, you will start to see that she’s actually much braver than a lion.

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Lions 🦁 are ‘brave’ because they are top of the food chain. They fear nothing. Therefore it’s easy to be “brave as a lion” right?

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Nell? 🐕 Well...her list of fears are quite endless. Roads, branches, people, kids, bin bags, a new room...anything new really.

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An amazon package will have her skittering to the other side of the house, hackles up so high she looks like a hyena.⠀

She likes what she knows & she knows what she likes.

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When we leave the house for a walk she charges straight for “her field”. ⠀

Her first walk, her safe walk, her known walk.

If we head towards the car she takes a little coaching.

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Sometimes it may take her to a new walk, a walk she grows to love but which walk is never guaranteed. Nell likes guaranteed.

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On the other hand car trips may have ended in a vet trip & one particularly long one took her to a whole new corner of the world, where it seems to rain an awful lot.⠀

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So reader you can understand why Nells have uncertainty about cars.

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HOWEVER this time when we were heading out, Nelly Noodle stopped, stared at us with those quizzical, honey coloured eyes and bounded with us to the car.

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She chose the car. She chose to trust us. She chose to face her fear of the uncertainty.

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I see nothing braver than that. Analysing every reason to be terrified & yet slowly but surely choosing to be brave.

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She’s a thinker, an over thinker, to the point she could probably turn it into a sport. The darting eyes, the wrinkled forehead & twitching ears; all part of her warm up before she faces her personal marathon. A fear that may seem silly to some but is extremely real to her.

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I think many of us can relate to Nell. Perhaps people that need to take a slower approach to our marathons, who struggle with things that come easier to others, including the things we love.

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I also think a lot of us would scoff at the idea of calling ourselves brave...yet really we are just a different kind of brave. No we are not as brave as a lion. We are a much stronger form of brave, we are as brave as a Nell.

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I see nothing to scoff at there.

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