Trudy Ederle: a lantern of resilience

This weekend, thanks to the film Young Woman and the Sea, I discovered the life of Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel, on 6 August 1926, in 14 hours and 31 minutes.

Human history is full of men and women whose lives whisper to us that no obstacle is solid enough to put out the flame behind our faith, or behind the faith of those who love us and hold our dreams up at arm's length.

When the heart orders us to carry on, despite the apparent absence of any reassuring sign, there is no acceptable choice other than crossing the desert that stands between us and the truth rumbling inside.

With, for our only star, the conviction that guides us past the storms of our fears, past the mirages of truth our society props up so clumsily, past the conditioning and the mental straitjackets of our times.

This woman did not merely take on the distance, the night, the jellyfish, the currents, the exhaustion and the cold. She took on patriarchy and every constraint imposed on women between the wars, when they had very little say over their own fate.

There is a long way to go before any of us could imagine matching the courage of this figurehead, who risked her life to pull off something that looked reckless, and to give the women of her generation a place as equals in society.

Thank you, Trudy, from the bottom of my heart. And thank you to all those lanterns made eternal by their bravery, lighting the road of our own resilience. One of those lights our century badly needs, to navigate the great transitions taking shape on the horizon.