A friend recently asked me while chatting on Facebook what books I had been reading. And I said that I was a little burnt out on fiction and had since dived into the world of non-fiction, and then proceeded to give her in a nutshell my present selection: "Well, one is on the Holocaust, another is about an Antarctic expedition, another is about horses, and one is about gambling." I've got Ernest Shackleton's
South and Ben Mezrich's
Bringing Down the House being simultaneously read, with Bill Nack's
Secretariat, Luci Swindoll's
I Married Adventure, and Doris Bergen's
War and Genocide on deck. I'm going to have to work up to
War and Genocide, which is a concise history of the Holocaust and I pulled Nack's and Swindoll's books off the shelf because 1) in preparation for Disney's upcoming movie version of the story of Secretariat and 2) Swindoll's book is just such an encouraging read - and talks a lot about Africa. They are both books I've read before but books that good are always worth re-reading. I remember having to slog my way through Nack's book initially when I read it the first time so hopefully I can make it through again. Mezrich's book is just all together fascinating now that I have seen the movie
21, the movie being based on the book. It's a true story about six MIT students who lead double lives and take Vegas for millions by playing black jack and counting cards. It's a wonderfully stunning, unnerving, and exciting read all at the same time. Makes me wish I was brave enough to take on Vegas and smart enough to count cards. It's a fleeting thought.
But I think the book that has been most compelling for me as of late has been Shackleton's
South. I had been talking to my friend Jonathan about our latest reads and I had mentioned I wanted to get my hands on some books about Shackleton's expedition to the South Pole. He was sweet enough to pick up a copy of Shackleton's memoir for me at a half-priced book store and I've been reading it ever since. If you're not familiar (like I was prior to reading this book) with Shackleton's adventures or his life, you can read the cliff-notes at
Wikipedia. The short version of the story is that Shackleton set out on the dawn of WWI to cross the Antarctic from sea to sea, but his ship
Endurance was eventually crushed between some ice floes and him and all of his men were stranded on ice floes for
months at a time. They all eventually - despite some of the worst weather conditions known to man and some of the severest trials - make it back to civilization alive. Meanwhile almost all of World War I had happened without their knowledge. Once Shackleton reached a whaling station in South Georgia and attemps to rescue the remaing men left behind in his party, he writes:
We were like mad men arisen from the dead to a world gone mad. Our minds accustomed themselves gradually to the tales of nations in arms, of deathless courage and unimagined slaughter, of a world-conflict that had grown beyond all conceptions, of vast red battlefields in grimmest contrast with the frigid whiteness we had left behind us. The reader may not realize quite how difficult it was for us to envisage nearly two years of the most stupendous war in history....No other civilized men could have been as blankly ignorant of world-shaking happenings as we were...
But you know what really has me so captivated by Shackleton's story? I think it's something that I've been thinking about for a long time, years maybe, off and on - this idea of the ordinary life. This idea that even in the most obscure and mundane and monotonous life, there's something worth telling, a life worth living. I think I went through this phase in college where I told myself if I didn't achieve x, y, and z, I was going to be a failure in life. I was so driven by this idea that everything had to be a grand adventure. And then I realized that even in a so-called common and ordinary life, I could still have a great adventure. Now, not to say that Shackleton and his men were exactly living ordinary lives, but to them they were. They were doing what their hearts had been set on and that was common for them. It was their lives to be men of the sea and to suffer through freezing cold temperatures. Shackleton would often mention times though when the ship would be stuck in a floe for a few days, the men would get out on the ice and play football. One part of me wants to say, "You're out in the middle of the stinkin' Antarctic freezing your fannies off, and you're playing football?!"
But this was life for them, a common, ordinary life. Shortly after the
Endurance sank and the crew was facing a bleak outlook, Shackleton wrote about how some of the men were telling the cook how they wanted their tea made. "
It occurred to me at the time that the incident had psychological interest. Here were men, their home crushed, the camp pitched on the unstable floes, and their chance of reaching safety apparently remote, calmly attending to the details of existence and giving their attention to such trifles as the strength of a brew of tea."
An extraordinary life being played out in ordinary ways. And as I drove to work the other morning, thinking about the story and just life in general, all I could come up with is that
there is magic in an ordinary life well-lived. It reminds me of Chesterton's (I think he said it anyway) quote when he says "one of the most extraordinary things in life is an ordinary man, his ordinary wife, and their ordinary children."
I think sometimes it's easy to get down and out about our "ordinary" lives, when we feel like all we do is punch the clock and do it all over again the next day. But it's a matter of perspective. If that's how we choose to view our lives, then yes, that's all it will be. But if we choose to see our lives - common or otherwise - as as adventure, an opportunity, then even the simplest tasks are things to be valued. I'd like to think I've been on my fair share of adventures, but I'd also like to think I can find magic in living that ordinary life.
