Soaked and Grinning, Still Walking the Bridge: Courage, Wonder, and Grit for Big Change

COURAGE - WONDER - FAITH - GRIT

Not recklessness. Grounded curiosity and playful wonder: the rubber-soled-boots kind of brave. On the calculated risks that change a life, and the faith it takes to begin before you can see where you’re going.

By Abigail Bruce, Integrative & Holistic Mind-Body Nurse Practitioner, Life Coach, Hypnotherapist & Nature Guide

You know the change you need to make, or at least you feel the pull of it. You’ve felt it for a while now. And you keep finding good reasons it isn’t the right time yet.

Here is what you maybe haven’t said out loud, even to yourself. You’re afraid the grass only looks greener, that you’ll leave something stable and find the other side is worse. And underneath that, the thought you barely let yourself think: but what if it could be more than I ever dared to dream? That back-and-forth keeps you up at night more than you’d admit.

It might be a career change, a move, the end of something, or the brave start of something else: a life that no longer fits the person you’ve become. And yet, be honest: there’s a part of you that lights up just imagining it. A flicker of something like delight. That part isn’t naive. It might be the truest compass you own.

As a coach, I won’t tell you what to do. The choice is yours, and you know your life better than anyone. But I will tell you something I learned soaked to the bone on a bridge in a thunderstorm: you don’t have to decide the whole thing today. You only have to be willing to step into the rain a little, to get wet, and see the view from the middle of the bridge before you decide anything at all.

So here is the quiet weighing you keep doing, late at night. You could stay safe in the seed: whole, intact, protected, nothing risked. Or you could let yourself be planted: watered, cracked open, exposed to the weather, and grow, slowly, from seed to shoot to leaf to flower. Maybe it’s worth the risk. Maybe staying sealed and safe is its own kind of loss. You already know which thought won’t leave you alone.

Part One: The Courage to Say Yes

The night I walked instead of taking the Uber

In April of 2024, I was nominated for a prestigious training. An honor, and a surprising one. I hadn’t gone looking for it. What I had been feeling, quietly and for some time, was a pull to expand: my practice, my voice, the number of people I could reach and support in this work. I didn’t yet know the shape of that expansion. I only knew the pull was real. The training sat right on the Delaware River, in Lambertville, New Jersey, and one evening, after dinner across the water, I needed to get back.

There was, of course, an easy option. I could have called an Uber. Dry, warm, sensible. Five minutes. But it was raining, really coming down, and I decided to walk the bridge over the Delaware instead, back toward Lambertville.

It was cold. The cars threw up sheets of water onto the sidewalk as they passed. Thunder rolled in low over the river, and lightning stitched the dark. And the clouds, oh, the clouds were so beautiful, great dramatic rolling things lit from somewhere behind, that I couldn’t have resented the rain if I’d tried. I had a rubber-topped hat and rubber-soled boots. I was, in every way that mattered, safe. Dressed for it. Grounded. And from inside that safety, I let myself get gloriously, laughingly soaked, walking over the dark water with the storm coming down around me, more awake than I had felt in months.

And out there, alone on the bridge in the thunder, the city lit and smeared gold across the wet, nobody waiting on me, nowhere I had to be, I felt wild. Free. Adventurous. On my own and not lonely about it, not for one second. Something in me came untethered. A part of myself that the careful, capable, get-it-all-done life keeps on a short leash slipped its rope and stood there in the rain, grinning. That was the spark. Everything that came after traces back to it.

But I want to be precise about why I could dangle like that in the wind and not be afraid. It wasn’t recklessness, and it wasn’t luck. I had done the work. I was a long way from home, dropped into a room full of astronauts and Olympians and CEOs, the dazzlingly accomplished, and by every outer measure I might have felt small there. I didn’t, because I was grounded. Comfortable in myself. And that is the secret the storm taught me: you can only come safely untethered when you are deeply rooted. The grounding is what makes the freedom safe.

I might have missed what I saw, felt what I felt, and realized what I needed, had I hopped in the Uber back to Lambertville. The wonder was available. The convenient, dry, sensible choice would have cost me the wonder entirely, and I’d never even have known what I’d traded away. I couldn’t have told you yet what that untethered feeling would become. I only knew I’d said some quiet, drenched yes, and that I would have to wait to learn what I’d agreed to.

I should tell you that rain and I have an old understanding. Water has always been the element that washes me: my fears, my tears, my sweat, my blood. It leaves me feeling at home wherever I happen to be standing. So perhaps I had an unfair advantage on that bridge. But I think we all have some element, some doorway, that returns us to ourselves if we let it. The trick is not climbing into the Uber before it can reach us.

The way it actually unfolded

Here is where I have to be honest with you, because the tidy version would be a lie, and you’d feel it. I did not walk off that bridge with a finished answer. The training was meant to point me toward the stage: keynote speaking, lights, a microphone. That was the direct route, right there in front of me, clearly marked. And I did not take it.

My way has never been the direct one. It bends. It deepens. It spirals. Over the months that followed, the pull I’d felt moved through me sideways and slantwise, through the ordinary pressures of a real life: student loans that don’t care about your epiphanies, a consulting and coaching and holistic-care practice that was growing and asking more of me. The yes I’d whispered in the rain didn’t march toward its destination. It wandered. It circled. It went quiet for stretches and then tugged again. Until, slowly, it found its way. Not to the stage, but to the page. To writing. To this. Words reaching toward you, whoever you are, on an ordinary afternoon.

And I’ll tell you why it landed there: not for fame, not for fortune. I write because it’s fun; a good sentence delights me the way the storm did. And I write for you: to help you feel something more deeply, and gently uplift the life you’re actually living. It turned out to be the truest way to expand my voice and reach more people. To sit beside you in a few good words and, if I’m lucky, leave you a little more alive than I found you. The straight road would have been faster. The winding one was mine.

Why courage needs faith to walk beside it

In the work I do, coaching and guiding people through big decisions, career changes, and major life transitions, the long pivots and the sudden ones, the moments of feeling stuck and the leaps into what’s next, I have come to believe that courage rarely travels alone. It needs faith walking beside it. And I should say plainly what I mean by both words, because they have been worn thin by overuse.

The faith I mean is not religious, necessarily. It is faith in the process itself: trust that the next true step is worth taking even when you cannot yet see the step after it, that the wandering and the spiraling are not detours from the path but the path. And the courage I mean has less to do with bravado than with the size of a heart. Most of what moves me to act, in the end, isn’t about me at all. It’s for the people I serve, for humanity, for this aching, beautiful planet we share. A heart turned outward like that will dare things a guarded heart never will. That, to me, is where real courage comes from. Not ego. Love big enough to make you brave.

But here is the part I most want to underline, and it asks something of you, not admiration of me. None of this comes for free. To live heart-centered and soul-guided is not a phrase you adopt; it is earned, through real and ongoing work: emotional, mental, physical. The work of knowing yourself. Of tending your roots so the winds don’t topple you. I had done that work before I ever stepped onto that bridge. It’s the reason I could come untethered and not be afraid. And it is, quietly, most of what I help people do.

Come back to that seed with me, because there is more in it than comfort and risk. To become anything at all, a seed has to let its shell crack, and the cracking is not gentle. There is pressure, soil, stone, weather, dark. The seed gets no guarantee. It does not know, in any way we’d call knowing, that it will become a flower. And still it opens. That is faith and courage in a single small act: to begin breaking open before you have any proof of the blossom.

That is where the first part of the story pauses: at the cracking open, the brave and drenched yes. So before we go on, let me bring it back to you, standing at the edge of your own crossing.

Maybe there’s a perfectly good Uber idling at your curb right now, the dry choice, the sensible one, and a little thunder in the distance, and you’re already reaching for the door out of habit. Before you climb in, check your boots. Not whether the conditions are perfect; they won’t be. But whether you are, in the ways that matter, rooted enough to come a little untethered. That kind of grounding doesn’t make you timid. It’s the very thing that lets you be free.

And if you are, or willing to begin tending those roots, then let yourself walk the bridge. Let yourself get a little wet. And here’s what we forget in all our weighing and worrying: it might be fun. Not just brave, not just meaningful. Fun. You might find yourself laughing halfway across, soaked and grinning, more awake than you’ve felt in months. Say the yes. Crack open. Splash a little.

But here is what no one tells you on that brave first night: the yes is the easy part.

Part Two: When It Rains It Pours

Because once you’ve stepped onto the bridge, the weather does not politely clear. Often it gets worse. The doubts arrive. The money tightens. The people who loved the old you go quiet. And just when you’ve handled the one hard thing, three more turn up at the door. When it rains, it pours, and you find yourself soaked through, far from either shore, wondering what on earth you were thinking. If you are somewhere in that middle right now, this part is for you.

Courage starts it. Grit finishes it.

Courage is loud and bright: the leap, the yes, the moment on the bridge. Faith is quieter: trusting the next step when you can’t see the one after it. But there is a third strength we talk about far less, and it’s the one that actually carries you home: grit. The plain, unglamorous staying power that gets you through the soil when the brave first moment is long behind you and the flower is nowhere in sight.

Think of the seed again. The cracking open takes courage. The long push through dark, packed earth, with no proof of sun. That takes grit. Most people don’t quit at the decision. They quit in the mud of the middle, where it pours and pours and nothing seems to be growing. The ones who bloom are rarely the most gifted or the most fearless. They’re the ones who kept going while it rained.

I know this middle from the inside. After that bright night on the bridge, my own path didn’t unfold in a clean line. It poured. There were student loans that didn’t care about my epiphany, a practice growing and asking more of me than I always had to give, long stretches where the yes I’d whispered went silent and I wondered if I’d imagined it. The becoming was real, but it came slantwise, slowly, through months that tested whether I meant it. Grit is what kept me walking the bridge long after the thrill of the storm had passed.

A woman who kept walking

I think of a physician I walked with, a woman who had given more than thirty years to medicine and felt, under all her success, the pull toward something new. The deciding came relatively quickly. The grit came after. A lateral move after three decades does not happen in a season. There were stretches where nothing visibly moved, where the old life still demanded everything while the new one refused to take shape. What held her steady was a truth we returned to again and again: nothing she had built was wasted. Every year of skill, every hard-won instinct, would travel with her into whatever came next. The middle wasn’t punishment for leaving the dry shore. It was the soil, where the becoming actually happens.

We didn’t leap. We took the next aligned step, and then the next, through metaphor and guided visualization, somatic work that let her body weigh in where her analytical mind kept stalling, and hypnotherapy to quiet the noise enough to hear what she actually wanted. The body knows things the spreadsheet doesn’t. Much of grit, it turns out, is staying quiet enough to keep hearing your own true direction under all the rain, because, as they say, God only whispers. Call it God, or Spirit, or the steady voice of your own deeper self; whatever name you give it, it rarely shouts. It waits for you to grow still enough to catch it, even soaked, even far from shore.

What grit actually looks like in the pouring rain

Grit is not gritting your teeth and white-knuckling through; that’s just suffering with good posture. Real grit is gentler and more cunning. It looks like shrinking the task to the next single step when the whole bridge feels impossible. Like tending your roots: rest, the people who steady you, the small daily practices, so the wind doesn’t topple you. Like remembering, on the worst days, that the pouring is not a sign you chose wrong. Storms are simply what the middle of any worthwhile crossing feels like.

And it looks like letting the rain do its old work. Water washes us: our fear, our weariness, the version of the story where we don’t make it. Even in the hardest middle there is a strange mercy: you are being watered. Things grow in this. You are growing in this, whether or not you can see it yet.

If you’re in the middle right now

Let me say the thing you most need to hear, soaked and weary as you are: keep walking. Not heroically. Not all at once. Just the next step, and then the one after it. You don’t have to see the far shore to reach it. You only have to refuse to climb back into the Uber every time the sky opens.

The pouring won’t last forever, though it feels endless from the middle of the bridge. One day, sooner than you fear, you’ll look up and find you’ve crossed: soaked, changed, more yourself than when you started, blinking in a light you couldn’t see while it rained. That is the quiet promise of grit. The clouds are more beautiful than you fear, and you are braver, and more alive, than the dry, careful story you’ve been telling about yourself. So go on. Skip the Uber. Walk the bridge. The bloom is real, and it is coming. Keep going. The shore is closer than it looks.

Whether you’re circling a brave yes, a career change, a major life transition, a leap you can’t yet justify, or already in the hard, pouring middle and unsure you can keep going, you don’t have to cross alone. This walking-beside-you work is the heart of what I do, through holistic life coaching, metaphor, guided visualization, somatic practice, and hypnotherapy, with people in San Francisco and worldwide.Book a free discovery call (https://www.abigailmindbodysoul.com/contact) and we'll find your next true step together.

Keep reading

• How to Survive & Thrive During Major Life Transitions for when the change is already underway.

• Stepping into Bigger Boots: Embracing the Journey on growing into a larger version of yourself.

• The Quiet Medicine of Wonder on letting yourself be moved, right where you stand.

I’m Abigail Bruce, an integrative and holistic mind-body nurse practitioner, life coach, hypnotherapist, and nature guide based in San Francisco, working with people here and worldwide. I write and speak on courage, transition, nature, and the inner life.

This piece is offered for inspiration and reflection, not as medical, mental-health, or professional advice. Coaching is not a substitute for therapy or medical care. Client stories are shared with details changed to protect privacy.