Courage

The "Leap of Faith"was the most frightening thing I had ever laid eyes on in my fourteen years of life. It was a terrifying sight even from the ground level and could not be more appropriately named. Leap of Faith is a water slide in Atlantis Resort, Bahamas that drops a near vertical sixty feet into a tube that's surrounded by a tank of sharks as if the drop itself wasn't scary enough. Yet I needed to ride it. I wanted to ride it. It was, after all, all I'd fantasized about ever since I discovered my family was going to Atlantis for vacation. But of course, I put it off till the last minute, as I always do with things that frighten me, until it was our last day at the resort. Up until this moment I had spent my vacation preparing myself. I started with intermediate slides, working my way up on the fear scale to Leap of Faith's sister slide, Abyss, a nearly identical drop without the shark tank or any form of vision as you descend into complete darkness. Now some might say that the Abyss would be scarier because you have no idea how large the drop actually is, but that's what I liked about it. You see, most of my fears can be deceived by convincing myself otherwise, such as convincing myself that my descent into darkness would take me one of the more mild slides I had been on earlier. So the Abyss was actually quite easy for me to conquer. However, there is no deceiving your mind about the sixty foot drop you are staring down to your death. And so, just as the ride says, I took a leap of faith. Or, I rather took an inch of faith as I hesitantly inched my my way down towards the slope of the slide until I let gravity take course and experienced the six most thrilling seconds of my life. Yes, I was terrified the entire time, but an act of courage can not be called courageous if there is not at least some element of fear. What makes an action courageous is the fact that you did not let that fear affect your decisions.