STORY BYThe teachers were everywhere: sleeping on the white coral beaches, sitting in the Mango trees, nibbling algae on the ocean floor, riding the air currents, warming on the lava rocks of the Galapagos Islands.
All that was required was our shift into what the Buddhists call “the beginner’s mind,” a state of seeing things anew, as if for the first time. So much is unique to those Ecuadorian islands that we were like kindergarteners being led by the hand to our classrooms on the first day of school.
The winged, finned and scaled creatures “asked” of us the existential question, “How then shall we live?” The curriculum for our eight days in this protected sanctuary 600 miles west of Ecuador focused on two main subjects: patience and fortitude.
The master teachers of patience were the giant Galapagos land tortoises. They wait 20 to 30 years to mate. When the long-deferred moment arrives, the male climbs on to the female’s back and completes his appointed task. She then embarks on a 15-mile trek from the green highlands down to the beach to lay her eggs in a hole she digs in the sand.
She stays a few hours to protect the eggs, and then heads back up to the cool green forests. When the eggs hatch in 60 to 90 days, the tiny tortoises scurry to the nearest brush in hopes of making it back up to the highlands before becoming a meal for something.
Witnessing the slow, deliberate pace of the lives of these creatures has the effect of decreasing the urgency and deepening the breath of those of us who live in an impulse-driven and time-chased world. The giant tortoises flow with life’s rhythm, doing what is necessary for procreation and survival, repeating the cycle for up to 200 years. While we humans clearly were given more complex tasks for our survival as a species, the giant tortoises remind us that not everything in life has to be rushed.
Fortitude was the second lesson we studied. Everything that survives on the Galapagos Islands, from the red Sally Lightfoot crabs to the lumbering, yellow land iguanas, teaches fortitude. Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, stopped in the Galapagos when he was a crewman on a whaling ship. He described the jagged lava cliffs and islands as “punishing.” The 150,000 tourists who visit the islands each year can only shake their heads in disbelief that the first human visitors, sailors washed ashore by a six-day squall in 1535, managed to survive and adapt to these surroundings. It reminds us of what we humans are challenged to do; what we can adapt to in order to survive and make life matter.
Nobel laureate Barbara McClintok, whose
genetic work
was with plants, said that it
was necessary
for her to “hold
communion” with the corn she studied
patiently from seedling to maturity.
McClintok had the patience and took the
time to see the myriad subtleties in plants
and flowers.
“In the summertime, when you walk down
the road, you’ll see the tulip leaves, if it’s
a little warm, turn themselves around so
that their backs are toward the sun. You
can just see where the sun hits them and
where the sun doesn’t hit…they move
around a great deal and are fantastically
beyond our wildest expectations.” This
patient pioneer of science had an eye for
the tiny miracles of life.
From hurricanes to holocausts to solitary struggles in a hospital room, every millisecond on this planet, there are valiant efforts to survive and help others to do the same. Whether or not our adversity defeats or transforms us is determined, in large part, by our choice to mine our pain and loss for purpose and meaning. In A Different Kind of Health: Finding Well-Being Despite Illness, Blair Justice writes, “The power of purpose can not only lift us above the sharp pain of an injury or acute illness but see us through the dark tunnel of depression or progressive infirmity. Sometimes the best purpose we can put to pain and illness is letting others see that it is possible to overcome even the disease that kills us.”(p.151)
Patience and fortitude are powerful enough to transform species down to the genomic level. Nobel Laureate Barbara McClintock spoke of this “stress” in her conclusion to her 1983 Nobel lecture. Various examples in nature “illustrate the importance of stress in instigating genome modification by mobilizing available cell mechanisms that restructure genomes, and in quite different ways. A few illustrations from nature are included because they support the conclusion that stress, and the genome's reaction to it, may underlie many species formations."
All living things become something different as a result of stress—which gives rise to patience and fortitude—even at the level of genomes. We are formed, just as much as the giant Galapagos tortoises and the tiny Galapagos penguins, by the environments in which we find ourselves and by our responses to what happens to us while we are there.
We left the Galapagos awed, humbled, and appreciative of our teachers who reminded us of two important lessons in successful living: Be patient. Things will happen in their own time. And be strong. See the gift in any adversity. It’s all a miracle.
UPDATED: 4-28-2006
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©2000-2006 Office of Institutional Advancement, UT-Houston
Dr. Blair Justice is professor emeritus of psychology at UT School of Public Health and the author of several books. His wife, Dr. Rita Justice is a psychologist in private practice in Houston.
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