You can’t see me now but I am sitting here waiting for strawberries to defrost and watching The Best of Mavericks which I recorded on Extreme Sports on May 29 but have only now gotten around to switching on to watch. There’s some great surfing on it; I don’t tend to like commented surfing – much prefer a music soundtrack in general. What goes through my mind though is how much I’d love to have been able to watch this sort of stuff on a Saturday morning when i was 15 years old when the choice was Anything Goes or nothing.
Anyway, amongst the items which caught my attention during the week was this article cribbing about Abby Sunderland. Actually, it was more whinging about Abby’s parents than Abby herself. If you haven’t heard of Abby Sunderland, that’s fine. It was hardly the biggest news story all week. Abby Sunderland is 16 years old and a solo round the world sailor. She went missing. She was found alive.
The article annoyed me on several levels because the general gist of it was that you shouldn’t really allow teenagers to do anything they want to do until you can’t actually stop them at the age of 18. Abby Sunderland is 16 but she’s obviously a competent sailor. She wouldn’t have gotten as far as she did otherwise. But her life is not worth more because she’s 16 rather than, say 19. I think the worst thing you can do to someone who has a dream like that and the competence to achieve it is to try and stop them just in case anything might go wrong because the same things might go wrong when they’re 30 as well as when they are 16.
There was no purpose whatsoever to her voyage.
Dea Birkett couldn’t see any purpose to the girl’s voyage which is fine. Dea doesn’t have to do the trip if she doesn’t want to. But Abby Sunderland wanted to do it and that is a pretty good reason for doing it in the first place.
Abby gave the same cliched reason for doing something so daft that we’ve all heard uttered tearfully a thousand times by teenage TV contestants: “I want to live my dream.”
Dissing people’s dreams is the height of arrogance and ignorance. I’m never going to sail around the world. I don’t want to. But I would fully support anyone who wanted to do something regardless of how sane or how crazy if they had the wherewithal and skills to do it regardless of what age they are because sometimes, they have a better understanding of where they are in their lives than some journalist in the UK who clearly is happier playing with rules and living by them rather than looking to herself and what she’d like to achieve.
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