YV W CO LUMIST
written by KAREN GROSZ
QUIET LEADERSHIP ABBY,
a young lady from Massachusetts, who admittedly spent little time outside of her city, sat with us at a campfire and told of the time she was scared to death — so scared she couldn’t move forward or backward. So, she just sat on a stump waiting for the end. Abby was hiking with a friend in California, a first for her, and she was on high alert. Like many of us, when we are on edge, we don’t always gather all of the information and as a result, our minds run wild. That’s what Abby did. Her friend had gotten ahead of her when Abby looked to the right and saw a field with not just one but several bears in it. She was scared to death. Now, I’ve spent many a year in Alaska, I’ve hiked a mountain trail or two here in Montana, and I have spent hours listening to men tell stories about their bear encounters, but I’d never heard of anyone just stopping, but that’s what Abby did. She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know how to save herself. She didn’t know if going forward or running backward would
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YVW MAGAZINE
make it worse. So she sat, crying quietly, unable to believe the situation she found herself in. When her friend came back to look for her, she asked, “What are you doing?” Abby replied that she was terrified of the bears. Abby’s friend looked to the field off to the right, laughed and said, “Oh Abby, those are just cows.” And that, my friend, is what being scared to death is usually like. We sit down, unable to move forward, unsure of how to save ourselves, or warn others, terrified of facts we don’t understand and myths too big for comprehension. And so we sit, without moving forward, until the day it becomes evident that that which we were most frightened of is not a bear hellbent on ending our life, but, instead, a cow, who will only swish its tail as we pass. When we are too scared to move, stalled between fight or flight, we have to ask a few more questions, gather a few more
