A day after reading Life of Pi and I’m still trying to
wrap my head around all its themes.
It was a book I almost gave up on, that for the first one
hundred pages or so reminded me of A Passage to India in the sense that it
seemed like one of those books forced upon unsuspecting children for summer
reading in preparation for an AP class in the fall. It seemed that for a book that was supposed
to be about a boy trapped on a boat with a Bengal tiger, it was taking a
horribly long time to actually get him out to sea.
The first part of the book, though, is important in
establishing Pi’s faith which ranges from Christianity to Islam and all
religions he can find and explore. He is
devout in his belief in God. There is
an innocence to his belief. He doesn’t
understand why he can’t believe in all religions. It will be his innocence which makes the end
of the book so devastating and it is faith, ultimately, that will make him a
survivor.
After the ship he is on sinks, Pi finds himself on a
lifeboat with an orangutan, zebra and hyena.
The hyena eventually makes short work of the already wounded zebra and
the aggressive, but smaller orangutan.
For all this time, Pi thinks that his greatest worry is the hyena, and
then he discovers that sleeping below him in the lifeboat is a 450 pound Bengal
tiger named Richard Parker.
Richard Parker dispatches the hyena and Pi is left alone on
the boat with a ferocious killer.
Quickly Pi makes an important decision. He cannot stay on the boat with Richard
Parker, so, while the animal recovers from seasickness, Pi devises a makeshift
raft from oars and lifejackets, ties it to the lifeboat with a forty foot
length of rope and hops on board, giving himself distance from the deadly
tiger.
But Pi finds life on the raft unacceptable. He is constantly wet for starters and no
matter how hard he tries to make the raft a home, he realizes that in order to
survive he must go back to the lifeboat and find a way to deal with Richard
Parker.
He identifies several scenarios which would result in the
tiger’s death, the easiest being to let the animal starve to death or die from
dehydration, but eventually Pi comes to the conclusion that he cannot do any of
these things, that the only way he will survive is on the lifeboat and the only
way he will survive Richard Parker is by taming him.
Raft or boat?
Miserable and safe vs. less miserable but with the risk of
being eaten while you sleep.
If Pi stays on the raft, he won’t be eaten, but he most
certainly won’t survive.
Going to the lifeboat gives him a better chance of survival
if he can avoid being eaten.
It seems like an easy decision until you’re staring at a 450
pound tiger.
Which would you choose?
I would argue that too often we choose the raft, that too
often we are paralyzed with fear and we convince ourselves that if we stay on
the raft just a little longer, something will change. A ship will find us. Richard Parker will die.
Staying on the raft is a passive response that hands your
fate over to chance.
Moving to the lifeboat, on the other hand, is a risk, but it
puts your fate in your own hands. Tame
the tiger and live.
We know this, I think.
We always know this deep inside that the riskier move can provide the
most reward.
And still we sit on the raft and wait.
Every year when I was teaching, I worked on getting my
students to take risks in their writing, knowing that when it came time for
them to take the FCAT Writes, that a riskier essay, one that was creative and
took chances had the best opportunity for scoring higher.
And every year, I would seemingly have at least half of my
students ready and willing to take this risk.
And every year, most of them would take the easy way out,
write the same old boring essays and take their passing 4’s when if they had
just taken a risk, they might have scored the perfect 6.
I write this, of course, realizing that I’m sitting on my
own raft right now, hoping passively that the circumstances of my life will
change, that my health will magically get better, that my books will become
overnight bestsellers, that money will appear under my pillow each night and I
will be able to afford seminary and other things like food and books (the two
staples of life).
And I know too, that to move forward, I will have to leave
the raft. I will need to take risks that
I’m always encouraging others to take, that when we look at the greatest
inventors and leaders in history, the ones that changed the world were the ones
who were single-minded and dogged in their approach, the ones that sometimes
fell to rock bottom and yet still wouldn’t stop.
What reading Life of Pi has taught me is that even though
we may not be stranded literally in the middle of the ocean, that our lives, the
stories of our lives, the “Life of Kendra,” the life of Beth and Rebecca and
Nancy and Danny and everyone is a story of survival, of how we move forward.
Life is about moving forward always.
Life is about assertiveness and not passivity.
It is about risks and knowing, always knowing, as Quaker
Thomas Kelly wrote that “Over the margins of our life comes a whisper, a faint
call, a premonition of richer living which we know we are passing by … that
there is a way of life vastly richer and deeper than this hurried existence, a
life of unhurried serenity and peace and power.”
May you hear that whisper in 2013 and let nothing pass you
by.
