By Susan
By now,
everyone's heard of the amazing Diana Nyad, who swam for almost 53 hours straight over
Labor Day weekend from Havana to Key West without a shark cage, becoming the
first person to ever do so.
There are so
many reasons this feat was incredible, even removing the grueling physical
aspects of swimming for 52 hours and 54 minutes from the equation. She was surrounded by
deadly jellyfish, the weather and water conditions had to be near-perfect, and
most fascinating of all, she is 64 years old.
But what I've
returned to over the past few days as I watched her interview with Dr. Sanjay Gupta
wasn't her crackled and sunburned skin, her swollen tongue and mouth from the
jellyfish mask, or—frankly—even her age. The lasting impression from Diana
Nyad's record-breaking swim, for me? She'd attempted and failed the seemingly
impossible dream four times before, beginning when she was 27 years old. This-- at age 64-- was her fifth attempt.
It's
a great reminder, isn't it, that everybody
fails?
Instead of
thinking only about success, think about each failure that brings you to your next
choice. Should you try again, or quit?
It made my own
goal of publishing my first novel seem very small. And with each failure along my twenty-five year writing road I was faced with a choice: keep writing, or quit, knowing that if I quit writing tomorrow, no one would beg me to
continue. I'm sure she'd been told for her entire life that her dream was
impossible, yet that didn't extinguish her passion for attempting it again, and
again, and again.
Which leads me
to my next thought:
Is
the passion that drives Diana Nyad to swim the same passion that burns in all
of us?
Some of us
change our dreams as we age, or transfer our dreams for ourselves into dreams
for our children. Many, many of us simply quit: too tired to continue at
something that feels impossible.
But
what if we don't quit?
I promise this:
none of us will swim from Havana to Key West—that's Diana Nyad's dream. Yet
whether your dream is a writing career, a college degree, a promotion at work,
or running that 5K, take Diana's words to heart:
We should never, ever give
up
You're never too old to
chase your dreams
It's never a solitary
sport, it's a team
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