Ernest Shackleton’s lost ship, Endurance, has been discovered. From Shackleton to President Zelensky, endurance is a profound virtue. So how can we develop it?

In the profound silence of the deep ocean, three thousand feet below the spot where sea ice crushed it, the camera on an unmanned sub scans the remains of Ernest Shackleton’s ship, which has just been rediscovered. Rigging and shattered masts strew the deck, but the hull is barely decayed since it sank in 1915. Across the stern we clearly see the ship’s name: ‘Endurance’. 

The ice defeated Shackleton’s attempt to cross Antarctica, and images from 1915 show the ship trapped like a dying animal in the frozen ocean. But the crew, famously survived thanks to the fortitude of Shackleton and his comrades on their astounding, Homeric journey to safety. 

Human weakness requires no explanation. The instinctive urge to avoid pain if we can is deeply rooted; so we distract ourselves, deny what’s happening or blame others. But courage, patience and endurance – the capacity to keep going despite hardship – are always surprising. I’ve felt that this week witnessing Ukraine’s continuing defiance and hearing President Zelenski, echoing Churchill in his address to the Commons, declaring that his country would keep fighting to the very end.

We naturally ask where heroic figures discover their strength and wonder how we would respond if our professions of courage were really tested. As a character in Shakespeare says, ‘there was never yet philosopher that could endure the tooth-ache patiently.’

While most of us will never face what’s happening in Ukraine, Buddhist teachings approach forebearance and endurance as a practice, starting with the small things. From this perspective, problems aren’t simply something to be endured. Some Buddhist traditions say we should regard difficulties as our teachers, that we should take them onto the path or even consider that they are the path. 

Real life, the time when we can be happy, fulfilled and at our best, doesn’t happen when our problems abate. It can only happen in the midst of whatever difficulties life may have brought us, and Buddhist teachers sometimes say that the path – the source of an authentic, meaningful life – is nothing other than the process of changing our response to difficulties.

Perhaps courage is surprising because it shows that, along with our weaknesses, we possess strengths that may be hidden even from ourselves. That, I think, is the power of Shackleton’s story and the image of the submerged, undecaying ship.