PHILOSOPHY FOR POLAR EXPLORERS

The author of Silence (2017) and Walking (2019) ponders discipline, courage, failure, and happiness.

Between 1990 and 1994, Norwegian explorer, art collector, and publisher Kagge completed three impressive feats: walking to the North and South Poles and climbing Mount Everest. In a slim volume illustrated by bone-chilling photographs of rugged glacial terrain, the author shares some of what he learned from those experiences as well as from other challenges—sailing across the Atlantic on a 35-foot boat severely battered by a storm, for example, and raising three teenage girls (“more daunting,” he admits, than climbing Everest). “What I know of discipline I learned above the tree line,” he reveals. Drawing on the insights of several other explorers—such as Roald Amundsen and Thor Heyerdahl—and thinkers including Socrates, Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, Wittgenstein, Pascal, and Kant, Kagge meditates about fear, solitude, and the meaning of challenges. “For any undertaking to be truly challenging, you have to stand to lose something,” he writes. Humans need challenges to “make us feel like we have to earn the gift of life.” Although being able to surmount danger “feels like a confirmation of our own existence,” a challenge need not involve the kind of physical exertion Kagge undertook in the polar expeditions, where, he found, the hardest thing was getting up in the morning and leaving his warm sleeping bag. Challenge also involves finding purpose, taking responsibility, and nurturing one’s dreams: “having dreams, and wondering about the world around me, is what will keep me going,” he writes. For Kagge, the secret to a good life is to “keep your joys simple.” Having met thousands of people on his world travels, he has come to believe that most undervalue themselves. “It seems that many of us are afraid of our own greatness,” he writes, “and so we make ourselves less than we are.”

Well-earned wisdom serenely imparted.