EDITORIAL

A

t the beginning of June I was flying from Seattle to Albuquerque, my nose pressed up against the window so as not to miss the amazing view of that stretch of the American West. I had meant to just glance at the in-flight magazine but I was struck by the editorial written by Jay Heinrichs. “Dear reader – it began – my dad’s motto in life was ‘no excuses’.” And he went on to explain why he had chosen to dedicate the whole issue of the magazine to people who had achieved “totally awesome” aims, often having had devastating bad luck as their launch pads, such as being born with a leg missing, like Anthony Robles, which did not prevent him from winning the 2011 American Wrestling Championship, competing against normally able athletes, or a severe visual impairment, like Californian Bruce Hall, which did not stop him from first learning to dive and then become an acclaimed underwater photographer, even going on to win a National Geographic competition. And Heinrichs also spoke, with admiration, of his wife Dorothy’s little big feat of climbing, alone, a 3,155 foot mountain more than a hundred times in a season. This at dawn, before going to work, after getting up in the dark, refusing to be discouraged by the bad weather, by the cold, by the unknown dangers of a lone climb. And then he carelessly added that his wife was 56.

      An economic crisis, indignados protesting against high finance that continues to get richer and richer, at the expense of ordinary people, who get dragged away by the police. And in so many places in the world hunger, disease, devastations that are not only the fruit of natural calamities or the collateral effects of war, but the reality of endemic poverty that the still opulent West is not able to deal with. Migrants fleeing from the thousands of “Souths” in the world, who bravely try to create a better life and who often make their landing on shores which are equally inhospitable. If you look around, the global situation is not a rosy prospect. And then there is the burden of individual bittereness which nobody is free from.

      The end of the year is the moment of weighing things up, of reflection, of projects for the new year, for the future, and those astonishing stories of extraordinary ordinary people came to my mind along with Heinrichs’ wife who climbs her mountain a hundred times just for the hell of it.

      The very American hymn to optimism and willpower that overcomes everything, launched by an in-flight magazine, is the way I have chosen to wish all our readers on both sides of the Atlantic, and on all shores that the Web enables us to reach, a Happy 2012 and the chance to choose one’s own mountain and to climb it.