Have you ever felt completely and utterly stuck? Like the world has you in its grip, and all you can do is hold on?

I know that place. For me, it really began at 19, when my body collapsed after years of declining health. I was trapped in a bed, drinking meals through a straw, with even the slightest sound being physically painful. The nights were long. The darkness seemed total. And I was left alone with nothing but my own mind.

It was in that darkness that I remembered a story I’d once heard in a documentary—the story of Ernest Shackleton and his ship, the Endurance.

A mission that failed before it even started

In 1914, Shackleton set out to be the first person to traverse the Antarctic continent. But before he ever made land, the ship became trapped in the ice. Their mission had failed before it even truly began.

Alone in my bed, I pictured those 28 men — marooned at the bottom of the world, forced to watch and listen as their only hope of survival was first crushed, then swallowed by the ice. Thousands of miles from anyone, with no modern communication or rescue equipment, they had every reason to believe their fate was sealed.

And yet...

A mission changed

In that place of utter hopelessness, Shackleton made a choice. Not exploration anymore, survival. Every. Single. Soul.

After a winter in absolute darkness and a desperate trek across melting spring ice, he and five men made an impossible 800-mile journey across the most treacherous seas in the world. Then he and two others hiked for 36 hours straight across impassable frozen mountains to find rescue.

He then had to rescue the 22 men he’d left stranded on Elephant Island. Three attempts failed, during which time it is said his hair turned completely white. But finally, on 30 August 1916, all 22 were brought home.

The original mission had failed. But the choice to change the mission produced something so remarkable that people are still reading and writing books about it more than a century later.


What the ice teaches

Life doesn’t always give us what we want. Despite what much of personal development world tells us, we are not in control of everything that happens to us. Some things, it seems, are simply meant to be endured.

Shackleton’s family motto was “By Endurance We Conquer.” His ship was named Endurance. That wasn’t coincidence — but it also didn’t mean he was in control of the ice that crushed it along with his dreams.

I was raised an atheist. I believed in nothing and, after being bullied by a friend at 13, I also believed in no one. I was full of rage and self-loathing, which I dealt with through cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs. 

The illness at 19 forced a stop. It forced me to see my own responsibility and to have compassion for my own pain. That compassion, slowly, extended outward. The life I have now — my work, my marriage, my faith, my spiritual service, everything — is built on the foundation that those years of illness forced me to lay. 

I would not have chosen any of it. I am grateful for all of it.

Real healing, I have come to believe, isn’t always about fixing what’s broken on the outside. Sometimes it’s about expanding who we are on the inside until we are large enough to carry what we’ve been given. Like Shackleton on the ice, we discover in our darkest times the one freedom that can never be taken away: the power to choose how we respond.

Change the mission. Keep every soul.

With hope, joy and love -
Hare Krishna and Namaste. I pray you have a blessed day.

What’s one small way you’re choosing how to respond right now?

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If something in this spoke to you, I’ve started creating pieces to carry the same feeling—simple reminders for the days we all need them.

You can explore them here.