Once upon a time, there was a girl named Kwan who was afraid of everything — afraid of the dark, afraid of dogs, afraid of speaking in front of class, even afraid of the sound of falling rain.
One day, before moving away to another house, her grandmother gave her an old wooden lantern.
“This lantern is magic,” Grandmother said. “When you light it, your fear will disappear.”
Kwan lit the lantern that first night, and a warm golden light glowed out. Strangely enough, the fear inside her chest began to fade. She walked into a dark room without trembling at all.
The next day, she spoke in front of her class without shaking, because she held the lantern close in her heart.
The following week, she petted her neighbor’s dog for the very first time in her life.
But then one day, the lantern ran out of oil. Kwan couldn’t find any more to refill it, and the light went out.
Her fear returned instantly.
Kwan sat alone crying beside the dark lantern, thinking of her grandmother far away.
Then she remembered something — the lantern had actually gone out once before, while she was walking home alone at night the week before. But she had kept walking anyway, all the way home.
She thought about it again. That night, the lantern had gone dark, but she hadn’t stopped, because she knew home wasn’t far.
Kwan looked at the empty lantern, and something began to make sense.
She stood up, walked into the dark room, her heart pounding but her feet not stopping.
Then she switched on the light.
She had done it — without the lantern at all.
She wrote a letter to her grandmother: “I understand now that the lantern wasn’t really magic. But it taught me that I could do it myself. And once I knew that, I didn’t need the lantern anymore.”
Grandmother read the letter and smiled, because that was exactly what she had always hoped Kwan would discover.
Moral: Courage doesn’t come from outside of us — it has always been hidden within. Sometimes we need something to help us find it. But once we do, it stays with us forever, without needing anything else at all.
