Читать книгу Hope’s Daughters - R. Wayne Willis - Страница 11

Ten years after snow-skiing 750 miles to reach the South Pole and one year after becoming the first woman to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean, Tori Murden McClure met Thor Heyerdahl. Heyerdahl had in 1947 crossed the Pacific Ocean, sailing from South America to the Polynesian Islands on a raft made of balsa logs, proving that South Americans had the materials and the ability to reach Polynesia hundreds of years before Columbus sailed to America. Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft became a bestseller in 1950. In 1951 the documentary film of the voyage won an Academy Award.

One day after the two explorers met, eighty-six-year-old Thor asked Tori if she had plans to write a book. After she admitted that she had thought about it, he whispered to her: “Be sure to leave room enough to grow.”3 She knew that he meant something like: “Do not ever let yourself get so totally defined by your past, however great or heroic or inconsequential your life has been.”

The day we believe there are no new worlds to conquer is the day something precious in our core begins to wither and die. Lucy once lectured Charlie Brown: “You know, life is like an ocean liner. Some people take their deck chair and put it on the stern, to see where they have been, and some put their deck chair on the bow, to see where they are going. Charlie Brown, tell me, where do you want to put your deck chair?”

Charlie Brown sheepishly confessed, “I can’t get my deck chair unfolded.”

Some of us, like Charlie Brown, have a deck chair still folded. We can make this year annus mirabilis, a year of wonders, a year for exploring new worlds of personal growth.