I have seen them both in myself, the success of accomplishment, and the vicissitude of abject despair. I know both intimately and have reconciled them to be the two faces of the same coin.
Life is fleeting moments of hopefulness and hopelessness. Each with its own complement of visions. You strike a match and see the flame as it burns the wood to a crisp. It is a fleeting warmth of the bursting glow and soon the charred remains all in a single moment of reflection.
What the human spirit mostly seeks, is to be. To be! In being, it accomplishes its most ardent task of satisfaction. Its goal in life. It is not Hamlet’s morose, wallowing wanton lust for despair in the “not to be.” No. Life is a march for accomplishments. To help others. To be kind. To Innovate. To create. To live! The human spirit does not define itself with loss. It defines itself through success. It does not ache for victimhood but in the conquering of it. The Spirit always finds when one door closes, it looks for another to open and goes to find that new promise.
And yet these days, that triumph of a spirit is constantly and deliberately being rendered moot. Shackled to the reins of a galloping authority, it is being dragged and ground in the grist of other’s desires. Discrete disincentives to level desire with feeding troughs of entitlements; the “mother’s milk” of dependency. The force of such a narrative is strong and easily overwhelms those that spend less on thought and reason and more on meaningless distractions of how others live their lives.
Submission to the demands follows via platitudes of self-preservation and safety, while liberty and freedom are torn asunder. Masks, distance, limited groups, no access to the religion of belonging, no thought unless approved by the groupthink machinery of corrupt ideology, no words, except those approved by the mobilized mob of ‘journalism.’ And no critical thinking encouraged among children, lest they begin to think for themselves and unravel this imposition of soft-tyranny. The constant peddling of untruths to mask the ultimate aim of command and control of the human spirit.
What happened to humanity?
Actually nothing. The triumph of the human soul lives and is gathering steam. The pendulum rises and always falls back to the center. Triumph of the human spirit still lives in the cracks and fissures of these blockading “impervious” walls of virtue-signaling and political correctness. These walls cannot stand and will crumble under the weight of their own lies and take down those that built them.
The human Spirit strives against the impossible. It strives against hardships. It has remained unbeaten and unsullied through history.
Earnest Shackleton defied the odds in 1909 to go to the South Pole where all longitudes merge, but with ailing men in his encampment was forced to surrender to Nature and not meet his goal. He wrote, ““Men go out into the void spaces of the world for various reasons. Some are actuated simply by a love of adventure, some have a keen thirst for scientific knowledge, and others again are drawn away from the trodden paths by the ‘lure of little voices,’ the mysterious fascination of the unknown. We had seen God in his splendors, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of men.”
A hundred years later, Henry Worsley in 2009 and then again in 2015 with
a “combination of eating, bending, driving, tying, pushing, bracing, draining, swearing, pausing and despairing, made two treks to the South Pole unaided and against all odds, and succeeded in both endeavors. A Triumph of the Spirit! The Spirit lived.
That spirit lives in all of us. The odds only make that Spirit more defiant and more resolute. So, in the scheme of life, we must not let our currents run awry and lose the name of action. Live on! We do not need to “weep, past hope, past cure, past help.” We just need to embody the indefatigable and indomitable Spirit of Worsley and others like him and move on to new heights and prepare for new challenges.
God Speed!
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