Whether in a court of law where a judge sustains an objection; or in a rowing shell where the sculler sustains a collision; or your wife of 50 years who has always sustained you but is no longer there waiting for you to return – sustained means “to carry on.”
When your dreams have been shattered, what gives you fortitude, strengthens your resolve, restores peace within, eases your mind, knits the broken pieces of your heart back together, returns joy to your soul?
What enables you to carry on?
By way of answer, here’s what I discovered.
One morning very early I was out rowing and hit a buoy. Dead center. Not one of those plastic buoys that give with the collision but one of those mid-channel, heavy-duty, metal navigational buoys.
My 27-foot racing scull but 13 inches wide was sinking, the bow crushed below the water line, quickly taking on water, becoming sluggish, controlling my destiny.
The fragile craft would not turn but only plough straight on, heading for the rocky shore which was fine by me as I preferred not to sink.
Upon beaching, the boat snapped in three sections, held together only by the thin-layered fiberglass.
After weeks of having painstakingly repaired her (after all we had spent hundreds and hundreds of miles together; seen all kinds of rough water together; won and lost so many races together, all of which made us inseparable) I could not resist one night the beckoning call of a beautiful sunset over the glass-like surface of the lake.
“Just a couple miles sweetheart and I’ll be back,” I said to my ever faithful wife sitting there on the end of the dock.
It would be five miles as it turned out, the joy of being back out on the water overcoming any concerns that darkness had long since descended.
I rowed on, the little red bow light blinking as if as happy as I was being in a world that made me most alive.
Finally, I turned for home, and she was there, waiting.
But not anymore. The chair is empty. I lost her to cancer just over a year ago.
So, what gives courage to endure this pain, to go places to discover beauty to replace this brokenness (now hiking about the mountains as opposed to rowing on the water), to yet plan for adventures to places I’ve not seen, is the memory of the hundreds and hundreds of miles my wife and I traveled together and the all-manner-of-rough-times we survived together, the love and laughter we had and the losses we shared.
That’s how I am sustained now.
And so, I carry on.
