I’m late to the chat. The book Endurance, by Alfred Lansing, about Shackelton’s Antarctic crossing rose to popularity early on in our days overseas. Guys primarily read the book and gleaned all kinds of significant lessons for leadership and life. I started it once and then didn’t finish it.

When my son gave me the book as a gift, it confused me but I tried to hide it. He didn’t seem interested in the book personally. It just seemed like an unlikely book to gift a mid–40’s…ok late 40’s… mom by a teenage son. I put it all together at book club yesterday as we reminded each other of upcoming books. Endurance is a fall book club selection! I’d put it on my Amazon wish list.

I finished it a week ago. It’s a good book to read when it gets hot outside–just a little tip from the south. Really, where I am, you could read it anytime but if it’s cold and dark in the winter in, say, Alaska, and you tend towards depression. Just wait and read it in the summer.

If you’re ever read Unbroken, Endurance pairs nicely. About a quarter of the way into the book you figure out you’re just going to be here for a while–in an impossible and lengthy stretch of circumstances most people avoid. And then it just goes on and on and on. Spoiler alert–everyone survives mostly intact but you should know that because of the early 2000’s and that Shackelteon’s journey happened over 100 years ago.

Knowing how it ends kept me going. I wanted to know how the author would describe the point where the Shackelton party was rescued or found help. They spent two years of their life where on the daily, their survival hung in the balance. When help came, what would they do?

Several times the happiness of the men struck me as I followed their journey of survival. Tight quarters, meager rations, bitter cold, darkness, danger all plagued their group but they enjoyed each other in ways humanity longs to connect. Not all the time, but they made life full as best they could with what they had. The simplicity of life in their circumstances seemed also to aid this joy, this living in the moment with what they saw before them.

It resonates with me as I think about some of the hardest seasons of life. The days when our apartments hovered close to freezing in Asia because of power brownouts and we traipsed over to friends whose brown out day differed from ours. The times when getting kids to a doctor involved 3 flights of stairs, strollers, taxis, trains filling an entire day and even then I had to translate the drug flyer and write an email to a pharmacist in the US to confirm dosages. Something about physically difficult things in life binds community together and I got to experience that in crossing cultures living abroad.

As hard or even harder is to experience trials that exist in ambiguity, undefined and sometimes invisible to others. Establishing the needed camaraderie to go through those hard times is essential but often more illusive. The dangers of an arctic floe are without, not within and the crisis are in tandem and aligned. In contrast, the endurance necessary for trials like grief is unique to each in its coming and going, and not visible to the naked eye.

And yet, reading a book like Endurance inspires awe and raises my soul to believe that God can enable people to endure far beyond our imaginations and that a key to that endurance is community. The people around us, even the difficult people, inform our ability to keep going when keeping going seems impossible.

I laughed when I realized I’d already completed our book club selection. I’m curious to how our group of middle and older women will talk about Shackelton and his great adventure. I don’t expect us to hammer down into how we will lead like Shackelton but women endure so much.

I’m sure we will hear some good endurance stories from each other!