NaturallyResilient

About

I am reading Earnest Hemingway’s book The Old Man and the Sea.In my 50 + years I have never read that book. It popped up on my son’s reading list for next year so I decided I better read it so we could discuss it. In a way it is a strange book in that it involves a different culture than we in the United States live in; a simpler life, a life that involves getting up, drinking some coffee and going to work. No spouse, no children (except the boy who was apprenticed to the Old Man, a very helpful child), coming home eating a little, maybe reading the paper and going to sleep. It is a rather predictable life, one without very many obligations. But even in that life, he is still hit with a major life challenge. He wrestles with a huge fish and after catching it and strapping it to his boat the sharks come up and eat it! All he takes home is a skeleton. How ironic.

Is his life really that different from our daily lives? We get up and usually have a more elaborate morning routine than just drinking coffee. Then we go to work and wrestle with problems and people (usually not fish). Every once in a while we have a major event in our lives, a dark day of the soul if you like, that we have to wrestle with and either come out victorious or it kills us; it may not kill us literally but it may kill our spirit.

Usually these types of events end up changing the person involved. The involved person, evolves. This is where Hemingway lost his chance at a more in depth character development. How did this experience change the old man?

This idea of character change is very interesting to me. Jane Austin does a good job of showing the evolution of her characters in her book Sense & Sensibility.That is one of my favorite books because it portrays real well how a person is always growing and changing as they work through the major challenges in his/her life.

Don’t think of the hardships in your life as limiting you. Think of them as changing you so you will be better equipped to change your world.