I started listening to Alfred Lansing's book Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage about the time I finally started walking up and down the hills in my neighborhood, rather than sticking to easier and more level paths. The book was an incredible story of triumph over adversity and strength of character. It was also a good choice for finally tackling comparatively small hurdle of walking up and down a few hills, for how could I tell myself that I couldn't make it up a hill, in a safe neighborhood, on a warm morning, when I was listening to the journal entries of men who were fighting for survival, struggling with frostbitten fingers and worse. The book was gripping, not only because the story was gripping, but because it brought the human touch to history. Through journal entries, one experiences the thoughts of the actual players in this epic battle, one sees heroes of history not as mythic creatures, but as men, men who make bad decisions, men with flaws, but men nonetheless, men who pull together and rise beyond themselves to survive dangers and conditions that seem unimaginable to us today. There were times, stopping to catch my breath or rest my muscles on a steep hill that tears would be rolling down my face, or was it the tears that forced me to stop, and catching my breath was only incidental. A bit of both, depending on the day, as the tears would certainly complicate my breathing and slow my muscles.
This is how history should be taught, not as dates, not as mythic hero-worship, as the story of how we humans can be more than the sum of our weaknesses, and how great achievement comes not from being perfectly good and strong, but from digging deep into our fears and our failings and rising above them.
Most of us will never have to endure anything as horrific as the struggle of these men. Most of us will never need an Ernest Shackleton to pull us together and keep us going. And for this I for one am incredibly grateful. And yet, by sharing the actual experience of these men, only partially, through their words and our imaginations, we can learn something more about ourselves, and perhaps strengthen our confidence in our own resolve and endurance, for battles both large and small.
