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Share Your Passion (con.)This
drive to explore has been pervasive throughout our history.
From the dawn of humanity the earliest explorers whose names we will
never know were driven to discover what was beyond the horizon.
They were followed by explorers we do know: Leif Eriksson, Marco Polo,
Christopher Columbus, James Cook, Sir Frances Drake, Ferdinand Magellan (who
was the first to circumvent the globe), Lewis & Clark, and Roald Amundsen
(who led the first expedition to the South Pole).
And this doesn't begin to name them all. But, more than that, this drive is found in almost all of us. How many of you have been to a place that was well off the beaten path and fantasized that you were the first person to have ever been there? I remember a time at Strawberry Lake in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The year was 1961 (my oldest son, Jeff, was a year old) we were vacationing with my wife Kathie's sister and her husband, Rich and Carolyn Pels. Two memorable things happened on this trip. The first, Rich and I invented Frisbee Golf...we played it for the first time on that trip (set up an 18 hole course and played it all week)...I have never known of anyone who played Frisbee Golf prior to 1961, if you do...please let me know. The second...well Rich and I decided to take a boat across the lake. When we landed on the other side, we felt like we were the first ever to set foot on that far shore. It was an eerie, exciting feeling. To be the first ever to set foot on a new land...this is how the early explorers must have felt, how Neil and Buzz must have felt. The feeling was only broken when we topped a small rise inland from the shore about a hundred yards and saw a telephone booth in the forest below. Regardless, this
feeling is shared by many. Some
of us are compelled to explore new places, new paths, to take roads less
traveled, to come home by a different route than the one we left by.
The new frontier of outer space is beckoning to us, and it is a siren
call that we can't ignore. We have the spirit worthy of the challenges we set for ourselves. We can gain the knowledge we need to find our way, so that the results of our reaching will lead to the betterment of life on this Earth. As a people, both individually and collectively, we can move forward
into a new day that has been shaped by the combined minds of millions of
individuals concentrating on a positive future for all of humanity We
must speak of the power to make of the Earth, the birth place of humanity, an
Eden again, as we accept the challenge to explore and settle the greatest
frontier of all time, the infinite frontier, the universe itself.
And we don't have to worry about the technology; it will come, as it
has now, just in time for us to be able to both save our planet, and leave it
to colonize new ones. As Mecca is to the Muslim and Jerusalem to the Christian and Jew, so the Earth will be to future generations of humanity, the place from whence we sprang, the holiest of holies for all time. A
while back, after I had finished speaking at a conference, a man came up to me
and said, "We don't belong in outer space, we belong down here taking
care of the Earth." I
smiled to myself and said, "Are you saying that if God had wanted us to
fly He would have given us wings?" "I
guess I am," he responded. I
looked at him and said, "What I know and you don't, is that God did want
us to fly, but He ran out of wings just before it was our turn to get a set.
We were actually pretty lucky. The
penguin got the last set and you know how far off the ground they've gotten
him. "Well,
when it got to be our turn and God saw that He didn't have any wings left, He
considered what He could do, and then He thought of a solution.
He gave us our creative, inquiring minds, minds that would allow us to
fly higher than any other animal in the world. "And
then... "He
gave us a universe to explore." Copyright 1999, Brad Fregger Page 4 |
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