Vacationing With The Dead

Lindbergh, Da Vinci, Galileo, Martin Luther King, Jr. They thumbed their nose at convention. They spat into the wind and dared it to spit back. Each of them reached beyond the horizon and grabbed tomorrow. Not for themselves. Not for posterity. They did it because they had to, because, as Jack London wrote, they “would rather be ashes than dust.” These men, and other men and women like them, could not float on the tides and be content to take life as it came. No, they were meant to carry others in their wake. They created the eddies that brought us changes in perspective and forced us all to swim against the current. They made us bigger than our evolutionary roots, bigger than our petty grievances. They gifted to us the human spirit; each one building on his pred View the rest of this article