Most of the oilers that resupplied us were named for explorers, and that was enough of a prompt me for evening prayers like this one. Shamefully, most of the crew wouldn’t ever know who they were. (Cue middle ager complaint: What are the teaching in schools these days?) Within this story I found a lesson for a problem with which many of our young people, Sailors included, struggle. My boys and I like to watch videos of craftsman doing their jobs so well that it almost looks like magic, but with the ubiquity of internet images showing how much better everyone does everything better than I do, it’s easy to fall into one of two traps. Either I despair that everyone can figure things out while I struggle, or I get frustrated that I can’t do everything the first time I try. It is a real problem how much people expect things to come easy for them without work, let alone the idea of delayed gratification. The lesson I hoped to convey in response to these problems I’d been hearing about, is that you only hear about the success, never the failures leading up to success, but if you want to be good, or if you want to acquire skill, it takes time and it takes work. Let me know if you think I succeeded.
You’re never good the first time you try.
Bob was going places. After his dad died when he was three years old, his mother and he moved to Portland, Maine. He stayed there for a while, but after he graduated from Bowdoin College—not far from Portland—he took his civil engineering degree and joined the Navy.
The Navy sent Bob to Nicaragua as first an assistant, then as the chief engineer of a project attempting to dig a canal there. That plan was going nowhere, but Bob was still going places, and, maybe because of the heat in Nicaragua, he decided he wanted to go north. With $500 of his mother’s money, he boarded a ship for Greenland, determined to make a solo trek to the North Pole. He didn’t make it. So, the Navy sent him back to Nicaragua.
On his next trip north he broke his leg while on the ship bound for Greenland and had to wait a few months to heal before setting out. This time he brought a team and was well financed, but his backers weren’t interested in the North Pole itself, and wanted to limit his explorations. Bob would have to wait for another chance to fulfill his dream of reaching the Pole.
He would, in fact, make several explorations in and around Greenland before trying again for the Pole. All the while gathering more and more skill, learning more and more from the local Inuit tribes about survival on the ice pack and how to navigate in places where everything looks the same to an untrained, inexperienced eye. Timing is tricky too, he learned, because you want to leave when the ice is thick and strong, yet still make your trip in the summer when there’s daylight, but return before the ice gets too thin.
On April 6, 1909 Bob’s accumulation of skill and knowledge paid off. Robert E. Peary finally reached the North Pole.
Sometimes when you hang around skilled professionals the make difficult jobs look easy, and like Robert Peary we might think we can just go charging in and go solo. The better approach is what Peary eventually did. Set a goal for yourself and then learn as much as you can from people who already know what you need to know. Just because someone makes it look easy doesn’t mean that it is, so be certain to find out as much as you can before trying on your own—you can never have too much knowledge. As the ancient proverb says:
Get wisdom, get understanding…Do not forsake wisdom, and she will protect you; love her, and she will watch over you. The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding. (Prov 4:5-7)
With wisdom and good understanding, then maybe we can make our jobs look easy.
LET US PRAY
O Lord, You became for us a refuge from generation to generation. Make known your right hand to us. Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom. We were filled with Your mercy in the morning, and in all our days we greatly rejoiced and were glad. Let the brightness of the Lord our God be upon us and prosper for us the work of our hands. (from Psalm 90)
AMEN
An Orthodox Priest Abroad 