Translator: Carl Luc Campbell Reviewer: Denise RQ
What would you do if you were not afraid?
If you weren't afraid
of running out of money or not having enough time?
If you weren't afraid of being ridiculed or perhaps scorned?
If you weren't afraid of the unknown or a failure,
what would you do?
That is the question I asked myself several years ago,
when my husband and children wanted to ride their bicycles
from Alaska to Argentina.
When I got really honest with myself,
I had to admit that, if I weren't afraid, I would go with them.
The trouble was that I was afraid.
Very afraid; terrified, in fact.
I was afraid
the mountains would be too high, that the winds would be too strong;
I was afraid that the cold would be too cold,
and the hot would be too hot.
But when I got really, really honest with myself,
I realized that what I was most afraid of was failure.
I was afraid I wouldn't be able to do it,
and that I would have to crawl back home with my tail between my legs.
So, in order to avoid that agony of defeat
and that humiliation of saying, "I couldn't do it,"
I decided it was better to not try at all.
It made sense to me.
If I never even climbed on that bike
then I would never have to crawl back home having failed.
And then one night, I was lying in bed, and I had one of those eureka moments,
a moment when I realized just how ridiculous I was being.
As I was lying in bed, I realized that I had a chance at failure.
I had a very good chance at failure, in fact.
I figured I probably had a 50/50 chance of it.
But I also realized that night
that if I never climbed on my bike,
and I never took that very first pedal stroke,
that I was looking at a 100% chance of failure.
And when I looked at it, from that perspective,
I realized that it made no sense not to try.
A few months later,
my husband and my children and I flew to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska,
and we spent the next three years pedaling south;
ours was a journey of 17,000 miles through 15 countries.
We climbed over 15,000 foot mountain passes,
we battled winds so strong they nearly blew us over.
The cold was bitter cold, and the heat was sweltering.
There were days that I called 'rubber band days'
because they stretched on and on until I thought I might snap,
but we kept going
one pedal stroke after another,
many, many, many of them.
And amazingly, we did it!
1,018 days after climbing on those heavily-laden bicycles in Alaska,
we pedaled our final mile and arrived at the southern tip of South America.
I was so afraid at the beginning of the journey,
afraid of failure, afraid of the unknown,
but as it turned out, that unknown ended up being our greatest resource.
Time and time again, random strangers went out of their way
to help us out, or sometimes, simply to add magic to our journey.
There were simple gestures like handing us a bag of apples
as we sat at a bus stop taking a break
and allowing us to sleep on the floor of a barn
when a massive storm was rolling in, and we had no place to stay.
And then, there was the time that I tested
the whole 'six degrees of separation' theory;
that idea that each one of us on Earth is separated
from every other person on our planet by a mere six steps.
It was 9 o'clock on a Friday night
when I realized that I was stranded in Bogota, Colombia, with my children.
I feared that we would be spending the night on a street corner.
It had all started off innocently enough:
we were cycling through Colombia
and stopped for a month or two in Manizales.
A reader of our blog invited us to Bogota
so the children and I jumped on the bus
for the eight-hour journey to the capital city.
Halfway there, I realized we had a problem, sort of;
I realized that I had forgotten
to confirm with our host that we were coming.
But I realized that really wasn't a problem
because if he wasn't there when we arrived,
we would simply go to a hotel and meet up with him the next day.
That was easy enough.
And sure enough,
he didn't answer his phone when we arrived,
and so, we jumped in a taxi, and we headed over to a hotel.
Just as we had done hundreds of nights before,
we walked up to the reception and asked for a room.
The clerk assured me she had space for three.
I started to fill out the paperwork, and she asked for our passports.
I reached into my fanny-pack, and I pulled out the photocopies,
which is what we had used for well over a year,
including two entire months in Colombia.
"I'm sorry" she said, "I can't take a photocopy."
"We have a very strict rule here in Bogota,
and we absolutely are not allowed
to let tourists stay without their passports.
Every hotel in the city is exactly the same."
And that... that was a problem
because I had left our passports in Manizales with my husband.
So I did what every other red-blooded American mother would do
who found herself stranded in Bogota:
I turned to Twitter.
(Laughter)
There was an ancient computer over in the corner of the hotel,
and the clerk was happy to let me use it.
I sat down, logged into Twitter, and typed out my plea,
"I need help. Do you know anybody in Bogota? Please retweet."
For those of you of not familiar with Twitter lingo,
'please retweet' means please send this message to your followers
or infer them to do the same in an ever-increasing circle.
And then, I sat back to wait.
It didn't take long before the first tweet came in,
"What do you need? What's going on?"
And so, my story came out in 140-character bits
as my fingers flew over the keyboard.
I watched as my original tweet flew through cyberspace,
and people I had never heard of sent me messages
asking me this, that, or the other thing.
But as time went on,
I became more and more convinced of the futility of my little experiment.
How did I ever expect to reach somebody in Bogota?
What was I thinking?
I looked over at my 11 year-old sons who sat patiently beside me,
trusting that I, mom, Wonder Woman, would be able to pull this off.
I only wished that I had their confidence.
After the longest 45 minutes in the history of mankind,
the tweet came in.
The tweet that is forever etched in my mind,
and I know I will never forget what it said,
"My best friend lives in Bogota. What do you need?"
Trembling with hopefulness, thinking that maybe, just maybe,
I had reached that sixth degree of separation,
I typed out my response.
Maybe, just maybe my children and I
would not be spending the night on a street corner after all.
After that, it all happened fast;
the man called the hotel, and a few minutes later,
a tall, dark, handsome man walked in.
He was my knight in shining armor, conveniently disguised as a Colombian man.
I am convinced the universe will conspire to help us.
When we most desperately need help,
that's when the universe steps in and provides what we need.
But here's the catch: It's up to us to start the process.
We need to swallow our pride and put out our plea.
We need to forget about that fear of failure
and put our faith in an unknown future.
If we do that, the universe will do the rest.
And so I ask you:
what is your dream?
What would you do if you were not afraid?
(Applause)