Resist and Persist
Resist and Persist is a five-day course on the Stoic art of self-discipline. Through the disciplines of desire, judgment, and action, it explores how to become less governed by impulses, pleasures, fears, and circumstances. *** This course is exclusive to Dying Every Day members.
The Discipline of Action
Resist and Persist (Day 3 of 5)
In January 1915, a ship called the Endurance became trapped in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea, off the coast of Antarctica.
She carried twenty-eight men under the command of the explorer Ernest Shackleton, who had set out to accomplish something no one had done before: cross the Antarctic continent on foot.
They never reached the continent.
The ice closed around the ship. For months the crew waited, hoping the pack would loosen and release them. Instead, the pressure intensified. The timbers groaned. Water began entering the hull. By November, Endurance had been crushed beyond saving and disappeared beneath the ice.
The expedition, as Shackleton had imagined it, was over.
What remained was survival.
The men camped on the drifting pack, salvaging what they could from the ship. Eventually they took to three small lifeboats and reached Elephant Island, an uninhabited piece of rock in the Southern Ocean. From there, Shackleton and five others set out in a twenty-two-foot boat, attempting an open-ocean journey of roughly eight hundred miles.
They reached the island. Then Shackleton and two companions crossed its mountainous interior to a whaling station and began organizing the rescue of the men they had left behind.
On August 30, 1916, after several failed attempts, Shackleton returned to Elephant Island. All twenty-eight men who had sailed aboard Endurance survived.
It is one of the great survival stories of polar exploration. But one feature of the expedition matters particularly for a course on discipline: throughout the ordeal, Shackleton and his officers tried to preserve structure.
When the ship was trapped, the crew established routines instead of giving in to endless waiting. They kept working, with meals and duties marking the passage of time. Later, on Elephant Island, Frank Wild held onto the hope of rescue and encouraged the men to stay ready for it.
Routine could not release the ship from the ice, calm the Southern Ocean, or guarantee rescue. What it could do was give the men something to do when circumstances offered them almost nothing they could control.
That brings us to the second Stoic discipline: action.
