In the Heart of the Sea

I finished In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick today. GREAT read! I know--my book list was for Palm Springs. Well, I just started flipping through this book and before I knew it, I had read 20 pages and I haven't been able to put it down since. It's this wonderful (but awful at the same time) true story about the whaleship, Essex, which set sail from Nantucket in 1819. I just ate it all up. The crew of the Essex faced some of the most heart-wrenching circumstances. They suffered from hunger, thirst, exhaustion, sun stroke, and a myriad of mental tests. As I was reading this afternoon, I thought about my run this morning and how tired and thirsty I was when we finished and realized that I couldn't even compare my discomfort with theirs. Sometimes we just need a good dose of others reality to put our lives into perspective.

Today I'm grateful for fresh water, good food (anything but hardtack), air conditioning, good friends, a job on land, and lessons learned from the lives of others. Life Lesson: Loveless1 knows his historic non-fiction!