Bear Grylls

Seven P.M. Half an hour to go until we started the laborious task of getting kitted up again.
It would take us at least an hour.
By the end no part of our bodies or faces would be visible. We would be transformed into cocooned figures, huddled, awaiting our fate.
I reached into the top pouch of my backpack and pulled out a few crumpled pages wrapped in plastic. I had brought them just for this moment.

Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall. But those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint.
Isaiah 40:29-31.

I felt that this was all I really had up here. There’s no one else with enough extra strength to keep you safe. It really is just you and your Maker. No pretense, no fluff — no plan B.
Over the next twenty-four hours, there would be a one in six chance of dying. That focuses the mind. And the bigger picture becomes important.
It was time to look death in the eye. Time to acknowledge that fear, hold the hand of the Almighty, and climb on.
And those simple Bible verses would ring round my head for the next night and day, as we pushed on ever higher.

Winston Churchill (him again!) once said words to the effect that everyone gets the chance to make their fortune once, but not everybody takes it.

<b>50. Keep Grounded

When was the last time you ventured into the great outdoors? I mean really ventured, where you set out into the unknown with just a map and compass, backpack and sleeping bag - the sort of venturing that makes your heart beat faster.</b>

Have you experienced the hypnotic patter of rain on your tent, the clear call of an owl or the rustling of the wind through the leaves at night? It’s a feeling of absolute freedom and belonging - a chance to reconnect with both ourselves and planet Earth.

<b>At night in the outdoors is also a reminder that the best things in life aren’t things.</b>

Money can’t buy the quiet calm that comes from sitting beside a mountain stream as it ‘tinkles’ through the rock and heather.

Money can’t buy the inspiration that you feel sat on a clifftop above the pounding of the ocean surf as it hits the rocks far below.

You can’t bottle feelings like that.

And sitting around a campfire under a sky of stars is the most ancient and wonderful of human activities. It reminds us of our place in the world, and in history - and it’s hard not to be humbled.

These sorts of simple activities cost so little yet they give us precious time to be ‘still- - time to reconnect, to clear our heads of the dross, to remind ourselves of our dreams and to see things in the perspective they often require.

We all need that regularly in our lives - more than you might imagine.

Life rewards the dogged, not the qualified.

I soon found my feet, and was much less homesick than I was at prep school. Thank God. I learned that with plenty of free time on our hands, and being encouraged to fill the time with “interests,” I could come up with some great adventures.
A couple of my best friends and I started climbing the huge old oak trees around the grounds, finding monkey routes through the branches that allowed us to travel between the trees, high up above the ground.
It was brilliant.
We soon had built a real-life Robin Hood den, with full-on branch swings, pulleys, and balancing bars high up in the treetops.
We crossed the Thames on the high girders above a railway bridge, we built rafts out of old Styrofoam and even made a boat out of an old bathtub to go down the river in. (Sadly this sank, as the water came in through the overflow hole, which was a fundamental flaw. Note to self: Test rafts before committing to big rivers in them.)
We spied on the beautiful French girls who worked in the kitchens, and even made camps on the rooftops overlooking the walkway they used on their way back from work. We would vainly attempt to try and chat them up as they passed.
In between many of these antics we had to work hard academically, as well as dress in ridiculous clothes, consisting of long tailcoats and waistcoats. This developed in me the art of making smart clothes look ragged, and ever since, I have maintained a lifelong love of wearing good-quality clothes in a messy way. It even earned me the nickname of “Scug,” from the deputy-headmaster. In Eton slang this roughly translates as: “A person of no account, and of dirty appearance.

Girls aside, the other thing I found in the last few years of being at school, was a quiet, but strong Christian faith – and this touched me profoundly, setting up a relationship or faith that has followed me ever since.

I am so grateful for this. It has provided me with a real anchor to my life and has been the secret strength to so many great adventures since.

But it came to me very simply one day at school, aged only sixteen.

As a young kid, I had always found that a faith in God was so natural. It was a simple comfort to me: unquestioning and personal.

But once I went to school and was forced to sit through somewhere in the region of nine hundred dry, Latin-liturgical, chapel services, listening to stereotypical churchy people droning on, I just thought that I had got the whole faith deal wrong.

Maybe God wasn’t intimate and personal but was much more like chapel was … tedious, judgemental, boring and irrelevant.

The irony was that if chapel was all of those things, a real faith is the opposite. But somehow, and without much thought, I had thrown the beautiful out with the boring. If church stinks, then faith must do, too.

The precious, natural, instinctive faith I had known when I was younger was tossed out with this newly found delusion that because I was growing up, it was time to ‘believe’ like a grown-up.

I mean, what does a child know about faith?

It took a low point at school, when my godfather, Stephen, died, to shake me into searching a bit harder to re-find this faith I had once known.

Life is like that. Sometimes it takes a jolt to make us sit and remember who and what we are really about.

Stephen had been my father’s best friend in the world. And he was like a second father to me. He came on all our family holidays, and spent almost every weekend down with us in the Isle of Wight in the summer, sailing with Dad and me. He died very suddenly and without warning, of a heart attack in Johannesburg.

I was devastated.

I remember sitting up a

Just under the South Summit I could make out the shape where Rob Hall lay. He had died up here some twenty-four months earlier.
His body, half covered in drift-snow, remained unchanged. Frozen in time. A stark reminder that those who survive the mountain do so because she allows you to.
But when she turns, she really turns.
And the further into her grasp you are, the greater the danger.
Right now, we were about as far into her grasp as it was possible to venture.
And I knew it.
Rob’s last words to his wife, Jan, had been: “Please don’t worry too much.”
They are desperate words from a mountaineer who bravely understood he was going to die.
I tried to shake his memory from my oxygen-starved brain. But I couldn’t.
<i>Just get going, Bear. Get this done, then get down.</i>

A challenge that tested Tom to his limit but in return gave him more than he could ever have imagined.

If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere.

"Say "why not?" rather than "why?

Never depend on those luck moments – they are gifts – but instead always build your own back-up plan.

But, that guy who quit also missed the real point. Good things come through grit and hard work, and all things worthwhile have a cost. In the case of the SAS, the cost was somewhere around a thousand barrels of sweat.

The difference between ordinary and extra-ordinary is so often just simply that little word - extra. And for me, I had always grown up with the belief that if someone succeeds it is because they are brilliant or talented or just better than me… and the more of these words I heard the smaller I always felt! But the truth is often very different… and for me to learn that ordinary me can achieve something extra-ordinary by giving that little bit extra, when everyone else gives up, meant the world to me and I really clung to it…

Almost a hundred years earlier, to the day, Samuel Smiles had written the final pages of his book <i>Self-Help.</i> It included this moving tale of heroism as an example for the Victorian Englishman to follow. For the fate of my great-grandfather, Walter, it was poignant in the extreme.

The vessel was steaming along the African coast with 472 men and 166 women and children on board.
The men consisted principally of recruits who had been only a short time in the service.
At two o’clock in the morning, while all were asleep below, the ship struck with violence upon a hidden rock, which penetrated her bottom; and it was at once felt that she would go down.
The roll of the drums called the soldiers to arms on the upper deck, and the men mustered as if on parade.
The word was passed to “save the women and children”; and the helpless creatures were brought from below, mostly undressed, and handed silently into the boats.
When they had all left the ship’s side, the commander of the vessel thoughtlessly called out, “All those that can swim, jump overboard and make for the boats.”
But Captain Wright, of the 91st Highlanders, said, “No! If you do that, the boats with the women will be swamped.” So the brave men stood motionless. Not a heart quailed; no one flinched from his duty.
“There was not a murmur, nor a cry among them,” said Captain Wright, a survivor, “until the vessel made her final plunge.”
Down went the ship, and down went the heroic band, firing a volley shot of joy as they sank beneath the waves.
Glory and honor to the gentle and the brave!
The examples of such men never die, but, like their memories, they are immortal.

As a young man, Walter undoubtedly would have read and known those words from his grandfather’s book.
Poignant in the extreme.
Indeed, the examples of such men never die, but, like their memories, they are immortal.

This is your life. Be bold with it. Live it with energy and purpose in the direction that excites you. Listen to your heart, look for your dreams: they are God-inspired.