It’s no surprise that we’ve got plenty of Ironmen, ultra-marathoners and regular old marathoners on the Fishbird team: adventure shares a kindred spirit with our work. And while people often remark that they could never run one of those races, we’re quick to point out that they most certainly can. For the race, the adventure, is the easy part. The hardest thing takes less than a second and comes at the very beginning. Committing to the unknown. The hours. The training. The conditions. The injuries. The emotions.
Simply put, the future.
In the latest issue of Outside magazine, there’s an article that speaks directly to this (funny how that works). We liked it so much we decided to recap it here.
Last September, a group of five unsponsored kayakers — dubbed Team Beer — made a first descent of Peru’s Río Huallaga: a Class V whitewater, 300-mile canyon deep in the Andes with three unscoutable gorge sections and rumors of a 150-foot waterfall. The team waited until the river was at its lowest flow before setting off into the 7,000-foot-deep canyon with nothing but their kayaks, 12 days’ worth of food, 200 feet of climbing rope, and one satellite phone.
The rubber hit the road on the second day of the trip, when the Huallaga crashed through a Class V rapid and entered one of the three unknown gorges. If the river turned unrunnable, the team would have no way to escape.
“The hardest part was committing,” said Matt Wilson, at 33 the leader of Team Beer. But commit they did. The box canyon they dropped into was barely more than ten feet wide, but it was clean and easily navigable. The following two unknown gorges were the same — beautiful and easy.
The 150-foot waterfall never materialized.
By committing to big, unknown futures, we usually find ourselves in beautiful places that aren’t so scary after all.
In the wake of last week’s tragic tsunami across northeastern Japan, we’ve seen an equally proportionate outpouring of thoughts, words, and images from around the world: some hopeful, supportive, and downright creative; some treading in a strange gray area; and others hurtful, close-minded, and toxic.
And yet, through it all, Japan has continued to move forward, showing a resiliency that can perhaps only be understood if you’re standing in the same shoes. We can’t fully imagine the countless acts of unreported fearlessness and bravery that are being required to overcome such a disaster. But a story we caught here gives us a brief glimpse at what it’s taking to get the job done.
On Tuesday, a small crew of fifty workers remained at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, braving radiation and fire in an attempt to keep the station’s reactors from melting down.
“The workers are being asked to make escalating — and perhaps existential — sacrifices that so far are being only implicitly acknowledged: Japan’s Health Ministry said Tuesday it was raising the legal limit on the amount of radiation to which each worker could be exposed, to 250 millisieverts from 100 millisieverts, five times the maximum exposure permitted for American nuclear plant workers.”
Who the Fukushima 50 are has remained a mystery. Tokyo Electric, the power station’s operator, refused to release the names or any other information about the team, including how long a worker is expected to endure exposure. Still, the few details that have slipped out paint a troubled picture: five workers have died, 22 have been injured, and two are missing.
So how do these noble 50 press on?
How do you work when you have no past to rely on?
No experience to go off of?
The answer is simple, though the execution is seldom seen in our world: you work from your imagination, from a perceived future that is bigger than self. We have no doubt that somewhere, deep in the hearts and souls of these 50, there is a picture of a better future for their countrymen that they are moving toward. Fishbird believes in the possibility of bringing this mindset to our everyday work. We can all learn something from The Fukushima 50 about moving beyond fear to become something extraordinary.
Since the completion of Magellan’s circumnavigation of the world in 1522, we’ve had experiential proof that Earth is, indeed, a sphere, and not the flat, infinite plane our ancestors first imagined. We’ve learned that there is no direction in space, no north or south, left or right.
So why are we, almost 500 years later, still talking about things going up and coming down? Are we just being lazy with our words? Does it even matter?
We believe it does. So did Buckminster Fuller, one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century.
In his masterwork, Critical Path, Fuller explains:
“Around the world nothing has ever been formally instituted in our educational systems to gear the human senses into spontaneous accord with our scientific knowledge… The first aviators flying completely around the Earth within its atmospheric mantle and gravitationally cohered to the planet, having completed half their circuit, did not feel “up-side-down.” They had to employ other words to correctly explain their experiences. So, aviators evolved the terms “coming-in” for a landing and “going-out,” not “down” and “up.” Those are the scientifically accreditable words—in and out. We can go only in, out, and around.”
Fishbird is all about becoming aware of unconscious habits, about questioning the habitual choices we make in our lives. We are only as powerful and intelligent as the stories we tell about ourselves and our world.
Maybe it’s time to change our stories.
