Hilton Head Island: great minds; passion; when to quit ; the love of the thing itself

I have started rewriting and came across the following which was written ten years ago.

great minds

  The cliche is ‘great minds think alike’ but I realized that is precisely wrong.  Great minds do not think alike:  originality is their greatness.

After reading my magazine article, ‘Use Yourself Up’, a reader, David, sent me a quote from George Bernard Shaw. 

        This is the true joy in life: the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy... I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live.  I rejoice in life for its own sake.  Life is no 'brief candle' to me.  It is a splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

So perhaps I was left with:  great minds sometimes think alike.

passion

One afternoon I turned on the television a few minutes before a basketball game between Duke and Notre Dame and saw the last few minutes of an interview with Duke’s coach, Mike Krzyzewski, who was about to have his sixty-eighth birthday and said:

         “I like to think that I’ve learned over the years, that I’m a better coach now than when I was just starting.  That I’m still learning.  But people somehow believe that you can only have passion when you are young and before you’ve achieved anything.  That once you have a certain amount of success you have nothing left to prove.  But I have not mellowed.  I have as much passion and enthusiasm as I ever did.”

when to quit sailing

A number of people wrote to me about their own rotator cuff problems.  I appreciated the benefit of their experience.

        Uniformly surgery had resulted in full restoration; and uniformly recovery had taken at least a half a year.

        One writer, Peter, was a bit older than I and living aboard his Sadler 29, in Cannes, France.

        In his email he quoted Mike Richey, who made Atlantic crossings in his 80s and said, “There is no reason to think of giving up sailing until your memory degrades to such an extent that you forget where you are going once you have left.”

the love of the thing itself

I had read Joshua Slocum’s SAILING ALONE AROUND THE WORLD first as a landlocked teenager and again many years later after having circumnavigated several times myself and sailed to many of the places Slocum did, but I had never read his THE VOYAGE OF THE LIBERDADE which he made from Brazil back to the United States with his wife and two young sons in a 35’ boat he built after the ship he owned was wrecked. 

The voyage of the LIBERDADE was audacious.  Perhaps as much as setting out in the SPRAY to become the first man to sail alone around the world.  

        Slocum had his own doubts about moving down from sailing a ship to a vessel only 35’, but once underway he wrote, “The old boating trick came back fresh to me, the love of the thing itself gaining on me as the little ship stood out; and my crew with one voice said, “ ‘Go on.’ ”