Roz Savage: Why I’m Rowing Across the Pacific

Roz Savage: Why I’m Rowing Across the Pacific

TED Talks by Roz Savage

Rating: ****

 

Being a rower myself, and having been out of commission and unable to row for a few months and counting now, I saw the title of this video and immediately wanted to give it a mull over.  The TED Talks video is about a woman who rowed across the Atlantic ocean and has more recently rowed across the Pacific ocean and used her adventure as a way to inspire people to take action against the dumping of garbage in the oceans and other things that are harshly damaging the environment.

Throughout the video, she talks about her different escapades and the Ecoheroes website and app that she will be releasing.  She goes on about how she used to think about typical things like finding a nice house, meeting a nice husband, and other things along those lines.  Then one day, she sat down and wrote a couple obituaries and realized that at the pace she was using, her life would never get where she wanted it to end up...  After doing a bit of figuring herself out, she decided to row across the Atlantic, which led to her then rowing across the Pacific and quickly becoming a radical environmentalist.  Something really inspiring about her story was how she talked about her overcoming of difficulties on her trip, like during her time on the Atlantic how every single one of her oars broke and she constantly got to the point where she felt like she just couldn’t go on any longer.  Yet with a goal in mind, a new found courage and motivation, a bit of duct tape, and makeshift repair skills that she learnt on the spot, she pushed on and completed her row.

As I read of someone accomplishing something as great as this, I felt the inspiration inside me stir with wild excitement.  Almost as soon as I had begun watching the video that feeling came along too.  I figure that one of the main reasons that I was so easily inspired by this is that I could relate to many aspects of it, being a rower and having been raised as an environmentalist myself.  Why it is that those aspects of Roz’s tale get to me are simple; on the rower side, one could only dream of achieving a row like the one she has gone and completed, and on the environmentalist side, getting people to come together through achieving something so inspirational and step up to the plate of fixing how humankind has wronged this world is again something that one would dream about.  Lastly, the single most inspiring thing to me about this woman, was that after being told she couldn’t do something because of her appearance and personality and truly believing that was how the world worked and she wasn’t capable, she said to heck with it and drove on showing everyone that you really can do whatever you want as long as you strive towards it with a passion.

Roz Savage: Why I’m Rowing Across the Pacific. TED Talks. April 2010. Web. 17 January 2013.