A 62-year-old American woman is making her fourth attempt to become the first person to swim from Cuba to the US without the protection of a shark cage.
Diana Nyad has already been stung several times by jellyfish but is continuing her 166km (103 mile) journey, team members said.
She left the Cuban capital, Havana, on Saturday afternoon and is aiming to reach Florida on Tuesday.
source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-19311095
Go Diana! Swim! Swim! Swim!
Diana is a rare, true hero, a person who challenges herself to break limits and strive for excellence and greatness.
We live in a truly sad time when we see praise an adulation of people for things which are not true achievements. Our society is sick because it doesn’t know what is important and what is superfluous or frivolous.
For a body or a society to be healthy it has to know, for the sake of its own integrity, what is most valuable and what is not. When the organism or the society forgets what is of true value it is sick. Even the Olympics I find highly grotesque and such a sick contortion of the idea of health for the sake of immense profits.
Better to ditch the Olympics and just go out for a good run. Even one drop of being a creator or an initiator – getting out and taking that run or swim your body’s been longing for – is better than an vast ocean of being a spectator.
Anyhow, I am so inspired by Diana that I thought of her today when running and ran extra hard for her. Even if she doesn’t make it to Florida she is still a hero and still a great person.
I love the fact that she is only competing against herself, and not for the sake of winning anything other than surpassing her own limits of achievement which is the highest of all rewards, far beyond glamour, fame, recognition, etc. And no one set this up, no one designed or created this “event”. It is something she set for herself, which has so much more meaning than something that is set for one.
Her story also inspires me: if she can withstand jellyfish stings and other tribulations while swimming in the ocean, I can withstand rude motorists and insulting pedestrians while running through the city grit.
I believe that we are always heroes when we carry out the revolution in our lives of getting up and getting out and going for it without fear. But of course such a mindset of real achievement runs totally counter to the propaganda mindset instilled on society about synthetically created achievements which fit in with the party lines, militarism, aggressiveness, etc.
If we are to stay healthy as a society we need to never lose sight of what true achievements are and not get deluded by the dominant paradigm false “achievements” which we are constantly being force-fed to society.
If we start to do this, and begin to see clearly, we will see that many true achievers are being persecuted in this day and age, especially bicyclists, many of whom have become martyrs for life and Mother Earth.
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