Antarctica: Where Control Ends
I never planned to go to Antarctica. It was not on a bucket list. To me, Antarctica belonged to textbooks, photographs and travel websites—a vast white place somewhere beyond ordinary life. Then one day, while looking at a map of South America, my eyes kept travelling south: Brazil, Argentina, Ushuaia, and then, farther still, Antarctica.
The idea arrived quietly. That is often how the decisions that change my life begin. They do not announce themselves as important; they simply appear, and something in me says: go.
At the time, I was exhausted. A few months earlier, we had launched the first Heart Chorus Global Initiative in Toronto. Thousands of red envelopes carrying messages of Pay It Forward had been linked together for a Guinness World Record. The event was successful, but many of the university students selected in China had been unable to join us because of visa problems. I could not quite let that go, so instead of resting, I immediately began preparing the next gathering in Hangzhou.
My husband could see what I was doing to myself. By then I was running a low fever almost every day and was far more tired than I wanted to admit. He told me to slow down. He was right, and I kept going. Some habits are remarkably persistent.
It was in that state that I decided to give myself a secret present. Once the Hangzhou event was over, I would go straight to Antarctica. I told no one, not even my husband.
There was something strangely familiar about the decision. At thirty-five, I had once put aside the life I knew, picked up a backpack and travelled alone. I wanted to see the world, to learn, perhaps even to understand what it meant to be alive. Years later, I felt that same pull toward the unknown.
There were, however, a few practical problems. I get seasick very easily. I dislike the cold. Outdoor adventure has never been one of my natural talents. Antarctica therefore seemed an excellent choice.
The journey began in Ushuaia. Before we had even reached Antarctica, birds were circling freely above the water and sea lions were lying around as if the world had never invented urgency. I remember watching them and thinking how little life sometimes seems to require.
Then we sailed south, and the sea quickly corrected any romantic ideas I might have had about expedition travel. After vomiting myself into dehydration, I came to a conclusion that still seems reasonable: human beings are probably equal under three circumstances—birth, death and seasickness. Once the ocean has taken over, titles and accomplishments become surprisingly difficult to maintain.
For days, my world narrowed to a bed, a ceiling and the hope that my body might eventually forgive me. Antarctica was somewhere outside. I knew that intellectually; my body had other priorities.
And then we arrived.
South Georgia at dawn was the first place that truly silenced me. Thousands upon thousands of penguins and seals filled the landscape. We stood among them in our bright expedition jackets while they looked back at us with what appeared to be mild curiosity. I suddenly found the usual expression—“we went to see the wildlife”—rather funny. Who exactly was observing whom?
In the human world, we are accustomed to placing ourselves at the centre. We build, classify, organize, schedule and name things. We make plans and expect reality to cooperate. Antarctica had very little interest in any of that.
One day the weather could be astonishingly beautiful. The next, we would be sitting in a small Zodiac in heavy rain and violent wind. An afternoon landing might be cancelled even under blue skies because conditions had suddenly become unsafe. At first, I reacted the way most of us do when a plan fails: what a pity.
Then Antarctica began training that response out of me.
If we could not land, we stood at the bow and let the wind nearly blow us away while trying to take photographs. When one destination became impossible, another route sometimes brought us into extraordinary ice fields. A day that seemed to have finished suddenly produced whales, seals or some other scene none of us had expected. One cancelled landing led us to an enormous field of icebergs. Another unexpected stop gave the expedition team a rare sighting of a mother seal and her very young pup resting on the ice.
The original plan had failed. The day had not. That difference began to interest me.
At St. Andrews Bay, there were so many penguins that numbers stopped being useful. Someone said more than a hundred thousand; looking across the landscape, that sounded conservative. We stayed for almost four hours in unusually good weather. Another passenger told me that on a previous visit, conditions had been so bad that only a few boats had managed to land and they had been allowed ashore for fifteen minutes.
This time, somehow, everything aligned. I was happy to credit the angels.
In Gold Harbour, I fell in love with an elephant seal. Its body was enormous and awkward, its eyes unexpectedly gentle. When I began to leave, it followed me. I turned around and it came close enough to lean against my leg. For a moment, we simply looked at each other. I could feel its weight, and I could also feel its softness.
Then I had to go. Before getting into the Zodiac, I turned back as if saying goodbye to an old friend: I came. I know you are well. Now I am leaving. Some encounters need nothing more.
Throughout the journey, another presence kept returning: Ernest Shackleton. On South Georgia, I stood at his memorial with the Heart Chorus flag. Later we reached Elephant Island, where members of his crew had once waited for rescue after the Endurance expedition collapsed into one of the great survival stories of polar exploration.
I already knew the story, but knowing something from a book and standing near the place where it happened are very different experiences. The ship was gone. The original expedition was over. The plan had failed completely. Shackleton eventually left twenty-two men on Elephant Island and set out with five others to find help. Months later, when he finally returned and saw the men still alive, his relief was overwhelming.
What stayed with me was not the mythology of the hero, but the problem he had faced: what do you do when reality has destroyed the plan?
There are situations in which perseverance means pushing harder. There are others in which pushing harder is useless. You cannot argue with the weather, negotiate with ice or make an ocean respect your schedule. Shackleton could not restore the expedition he had intended to lead. What he could do was look for the next possibility.
That distinction touched something in me. For years, much of my work had depended on making things happen. When something failed, I looked for another way. If a door closed, I searched for a window. If an obstacle appeared, my instinct was usually to work harder. That stubbornness had carried me a long way. It had also exhausted me.
Antarctica began to show me that there is a difference between doing everything within our power and imagining that everything is within our power. One requires commitment; the other is an illusion.
Near the end of the journey, a member of the expedition team asked me, “If you could describe Antarctica in only one word, what would it be?”
My answer came almost immediately: “Powerlessness.”
Not defeat. Not despair. Powerlessness.
By then I had taken countless photographs and written pages of notes. I had tried to capture the penguins, the ice, the strange blue light, the wind, the whales and the silence. None of it worked. A photograph could show an iceberg but not its scale. A number could tell you how many penguins stood on a beach but not what it felt like to be surrounded by them. I could describe the elephant seal leaning against my leg, but the sentence did not contain its weight.
Words were words. Photographs were photographs. The experience remained somewhere beyond them.
Eventually I gave up trying to possess it. Perhaps that was the most honest response.
There are things we can explain, solve and overcome. There are others that simply exceed us. The danger is in confusing the two. If we believe everything is beyond our control, we give up too early. If we believe everything can be controlled, we exhaust ourselves fighting reality.
Somewhere between those two lies the work of being human: do what can be done, look for another possibility when the first one disappears, and when nothing more can be done, know how to stop fighting what is.
As the ship eventually turned back toward Ushuaia, Shackleton’s story opened a door into my own past. I thought again about Heart Chorus, about the years of starting things without knowing whether they would work, about volunteers who kept going when the outcome was uncertain, and about the people who had walked with me along the way.
Without passion, perhaps we never begin. Without belief, perhaps no one comes with us. Without perseverance, many things remain impossible simply because we stop too soon. But perseverance is not the same as forcing life to obey us. Sometimes the next possibility appears only after we have accepted that the original one is gone.
That may have been what Antarctica gave me.
I had gone there after months of exhausting myself trying to make things happen. At the end of the world, I found a place where the weather, the sea, the animals and the ice continued entirely on their own terms. I was very small there, and strangely, I found that comforting.
The journey did not make me less willing to act. It made me more interested in knowing where action ends. There is freedom in that distinction. We are not as powerful as we like to imagine, but neither are we powerless in every sense. We may not control what happens next, yet there is almost always something that still belongs to us: our attention, our judgment, the next decision, the willingness to keep looking, and eventually, when necessary, the wisdom to let go.
I went to Antarctica thinking I was giving myself an adventure. What I received was a better sense of scale.
Some things are ours to do. Some things are not.
Learning the difference may be one of life’s more important journeys.
南極：生命的終極意義
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回頭看人生，真正改變我們方向的，往往不是那些深思熟慮的大決定，而是一個當時看起來並不起眼的念頭。
我去南極，就是這樣開始的。
那時候，我從來沒有想過要去南極「打卡」。南極對我來說，只存在於課本、照片和旅遊網站。直到有一天，我看著南美洲的地圖，視線一路從巴西、阿根廷往下走，到了火地群島的烏斯懷亞，再往下，就是南極。
忽然很想去。
其實那時候，我已經很累。
2015 年，我們剛在加拿大多倫多完成第一屆「全球成長心連心」，接著又忙著籌備杭州站。先生看我長期低燒、疲憊不堪，一直叫我休息，我卻還是脖子硬。
就在這樣的狀態下，我偷偷替自己安排了一份禮物：杭州活動結束後，直奔南極。
這件事我誰都沒有告訴，連先生也不知道。
那種感覺很像我 35 歲那年，忽然決定放下事業，一個人背起行囊去旅行。只是這一次更瘋狂——我天生暈船，怕冷，又沒有甚麼戶外運動細胞，居然選了地球最南端開始流浪。
果然，南極沒有讓我失望。
先是暈船暈到嘔吐脫水。
躺在床上的時候，我得出一個結論：人類有三種情況是平等的——出生、死亡和暈船。
在大海面前，甚麼身份、能力、成就都沒有太大用處。
好不容易捱到南喬治亞島，凌晨四點半起床，五點登陸索爾茲伯里平原。成千上萬隻企鵝和海獅佈滿整片土地。我們穿著鮮艷的外套站在牠們中間，忽然分不清到底是我們來看企鵝，還是企鵝在看我們這群外來的動物。
在人類的世界裡，我們總覺得自己是主角。
到了這裡，才發現根本沒有人在乎你是誰。
天氣更加不在乎。
有一天風和日麗，連來過十幾次的探險隊員都說難得︔第二天就在大雨和強風中坐橡皮艇，搖到最後回房倒頭就睡。下午明明陽光燦爛，卻因為突然颳起強風，原定登陸被取消。
既然不能登陸，就在船頭拍幾張被風吹得東倒西歪的照片。
無常無常，海上生涯原是夢。
南極的有趣，也正在這裡。
原定計劃常常不能實現，可是 B 計劃往往又送來意外驚喜。因為不能登陸赤褐峭壁，我們遇上了巨大的冰山群，還看見海豹母子躺在浮冰上。以為一天的節目已經完了，晚上又忽然穿越冰洋，害我已經鑽進被窩，還是忍不住爬起來跑到船頭。
南極總是讓人措手不及。
在聖安德魯灣，更是「多到唔知點算」。
放眼望去全是企鵝，十萬隻這個數字聽起來都顯得保守。我們在難得的好天氣裡遊蕩了接近四個小時。同行的人說，上一次來天氣太差，只能登陸十五分鐘。
有些事情，真的只能說是機緣。
在黃金灣，我愛上了一頭象海豹。
牠胖得不像話，眼睛卻出奇地單純。我準備離開時，牠居然追過來，靠在我的腿上。我低頭看著牠，那一刻感覺到牠的重量，也感覺到牠的溫柔。
可是我還是要走。
登上小艇之前，我回頭看著牠，心裡像是在說：我來過，知道你安好，我走了。
有些相遇就是這樣。
不需要有結果。
南極一路上，還有一個人不斷出現——Shackleton。
來到南喬治亞島，我帶著「全球成長心連心」的旗幟去他的紀念碑前留影。到了大象島，又看到當年他的船員被困在這裡的地方。
他的故事我本來就知道，但在南極重新聽，感受完全不同。
船沉了，計劃沒了，甚麼都沒有按照原定方向發生。他留下 22 名船員，帶著另外 5 人出去求援。136 天後，他終於回來，遠遠看到那些人還活著，激動地喊：「他們還在那兒！」
那一刻，我想到很多人。
想到一路上跟我做「成長心連心」的義工，想到那些在看不到結果的情況下，仍然願意往前走的人，也想到自己。
激情讓人出發，信念讓人同行，堅毅讓人不輕易放棄，而真正到了沒有路的時候，還要懂得尋找另外一種可能。
可是走到旅程後段，探險隊員忽然問我：
「如果只能用一個詞來形容南極，你會用甚麼︖」
我幾乎沒有想。
「無力感。」
在這裡，真的一點辦法都沒有。
不是悲觀，也不是挫敗。
而是忽然發現，無論拍多少照片、寫多少文字，都沒有辦法把眼前的南極帶走。
十萬隻企鵝不是一個數字。
冰川的藍不是一種顏色。
海豹靠在腿上的重量，也不在照片裡。
我寫到最後，只好放棄。
有些東西，本來就不是用來說清楚的。
回航烏斯懷亞的時候，Shackleton 的故事像打開了一道記憶的門。我重新想起自己一路走來為甚麼做「成長心連心」，也重新看見那條從很多年前已經開始走的路。
南極沒有給我甚麼標準答案。
它反而讓我看見人的有限。
面對大海、天氣、生死、自然，我們其實非常渺小︔可是就在這份無力裡，人仍然可以選擇怎樣走下一步。
能做的，盡力做。
不能做的，就放下。
沒有路的時候，再找一個可能。
也許生命的終極意義，從來不在於我們可以控制多少，而是在知道自己如此有限之後，仍然願意好好活，好好走。