All You Need Is 20 Second of Insane Courage

All You Need Is 20 Second of Insane Courage

Or so I told myself every time I snuck into the kitchen for another slice of my grandma’s pineapple cake.

Photo by ryan birk on Unsplash

William Faulkner wrote — Be scared. You can’t help that. But don’t be afraid.

The kitchen was dark.

There was always a faint orange glow from the street light outside that fell through the curtains and landed in a stripe across the linoleum floor. I knew that stripe. I’d memorized where it hit, where it stopped, how far I could walk in the dark before I entered the light and became visible.

I was seven years old and I was hunting cake.

My grandmother made her pineapple cake once a year. Maybe twice if someone in the family had something worth celebrating, which wasn’t often. She started it the night before — soaking the pineapple, measuring things in her palm the way old women do, moving around that kitchen with the quiet authority of someone who has never once in her life needed a recipe.

The rule was simple. One slice per person. After dinner. No exceptions.

I had already had my slice. I had eaten it so slowly it was almost reverent. And then I had thought about the remaining cake on the counter for the next four hours until everyone went to bed.

The floor had two boards that creaked — third from the door, one beneath the cabinet. I reached the counter. I lifted the glass dome. I cut the smallest slice I could justify. I ate it standing up, in the dark, with my fingers, faster than I’d ever eaten anything in my life.

And then I stood there in the orange stripe of light, sugar on my hands, completely still.

Not because I was afraid of getting caught anymore.

Because I was happy. Purely, stupidly, completely happy.

I think about that child a lot.

Children have a different relationship with fear than adults do. Not because they’re stupid or naive. Because they haven’t yet learned to treat fear as a full stop. To a child, fear is information — the same way hunger is information, or cold, or the dark. It tells you something. It doesn’t tell you to stop.

Ask a seven-year-old what they want to be and they will tell you astronaut, dragon tamer, the person who invents a new color. They’re not being unrealistic. They genuinely don’t have the information that these things are hard, and because they don’t have that information, they don’t use it as a wall.

They live, as someone once wrote, with an inexhaustible curiosity that adults spend most of their lives trying to recover.

A scare is a moment. It visits and leaves. Your heart rate spikes, your palms go wet, you feel it in the top of your chest and then it passes through you and you move. Fear is different.

The cake was scary to go after. The consequences were real — I could have been caught, woken someone up, lost a privilege, disappointed my grandmother who I loved more than almost anyone. Those were actual risks.

But I wasn’t afraid. I was scared and then I went.

This is the entire move. This is all of it.

Twenty seconds isn’t a trick or a technique. It’s the gap between the fear arriving and the fear winning. What you do in that gap is your life.

My grandmother is gone now.

The cake exists only in the way things exist after the person who made them is gone — in the memory of the smell, in the texture of an absence that has its own specific shape. I would give a lot for another slice. I would give more to go back and eat it standing up in the dark, sugar on my hands, heart loud, completely still in the orange light.

The life you want — it doesn’t require you to become someone else. It doesn’t require fearlessness, which is a myth, an advertisement, It requires twenty seconds. Then another twenty. Then another.

Each one survivable.

Each one a little less frightening than the last.

Each one a slice of something that tastes better for the getting of it.

The stripe of orange light is still there, in some kitchen, in some part of you.

You still know where the boards creak.

Go.