“Life is either a daring adventure … or nothing.” Hellen Keller
In 1981, just a few months after venturing from my university sanctuary into the wide world, I found myself gasping for air high on a mountain in northern Spain. I was climbing a snow cornice towards a peak lost in the mist above. To my left and right, ice fields plunged down towards an abyss—and certain death. My only protection: crampons (steel teeth strapped onto the bottom of my boots), a piolet (an ice ax I’d barely learned to use), and a rope stretching to the intrepid mountaineers in front and behind me. If I fell, would I drag them down, too? If one of them fell, would he drag me?
I gulped and wondered, “What the hell is an Ohio boy like me doing here? Never in my wildest dreams …”
How had it happened? I’d made the bizarre, daring, and, as it turned out, most consequential decision of my life: Rather than get a job and start a career after graduation — which virtually all of my more responsible friends were “wisely” doing — I chose to squander a few thousand dollars I’d inherited in order to go abroad. I was motivated only by a vague, nagging sense that, given my limited experience in American Catholic schools (grade school, high school, and college), I just might have a rather narrow perspective on life.
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