Wednesday, Sep 04, 2013
It takes women like Diana Nyad to re-empower timeless truths — usually condemned as cliches and consigned to the heap of ineffectual beliefs — to their original import and glory. Her astonishing feat of swimming from Havana to Florida at the age of 64, a world first, is awe-inspiring. What makes her courage and determination more amazing is that she did not have to do it. But Nyad is a believer in pursuing her dreams, of never giving up and building success on failures. The old saying, ‘Try, try. try, till you succeed’ was not discarded by her as a cliche. That’s probably why it enabled her to make a fifth attempt at undertaking the swim and succeeding at it spectacularly.
There are lessons in this for all of us, especially in today’s times when we willingly fracture our attention spans in frivolous pursuits, sacrifice our long-term goals for instant gratification, mistake impulses for personal dreams and venerate youth as the most desirable state of life. To be able to have a dream and the passion to pursue it, irrespective of age, is not the privilege of a few. We all have been blessed with it.
Gulf News
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