04/14/2022
Below is a selection of excerpts from the final chapter of "Adrift." Steve Callahan's story of surviving 76 days lost at sea in a small life-raft.
"I've continued to sail too. The sea remains the world's greatest wilderness. To my mind, voyaging through wilderness, be they full of woods or waves, is essential to the growth and maturity of the human spirit. It is in the wilderness that you really learn who you are. it is in facing the challenge of the wilderness that the thickness of your wallet becomes irrelevant and your capabilities become the truer measure of your value...I found life more free than I ever imagined...every day is a gift, not a right. I know that to be well fed, painless and in the company of friends and loved ones are privileges too few enjoy in this often brutal world...my odyssey showed me that I was a lot stronger and more resilient than I thought possible...the sea probed numerous weaknesses and failures. In many ways I had been equally hopeless in life...I could not accept my own limitations as a human being nor those of the people around me. I was a man alone and quite adrift well before the sea cast me into my raft...when I washed ashore it was with gratitude that I had been given a chance to examine my weaknesses...the sea that tested me also proved forgiving enough to let me live. For the first time in my life I felt truly humbled...the heartfelt realization of one's insignificance yields a calming sense of being completely connected to the greater whole. As a tiny part of the world and humanity, I now feel more at peace and much larger than I ever felt as a man alone."