Rev. Cwirla's Blogosphere

Zac Sunderland sailed into safe harbor in Marina Del Ray, CA yesterday.  At age 17, the Thousand Oaks, CA teenager became the youngest person to solo-circumnavigate the globe in a sail boat.  How cool is that?  You can read about Zac's excellent adventure in his running blog.

The closest I got to high adventure when I was a kid was riding my bike to the forest preserves with some friends and not telling our mothers.  This was before the age of the cell phone leash.  Zac's adventures included pirates off the coast of Indonesia, fifteen foot swells on the Indian Ocean, and nearly getting crushed by freighters in the Panama Canal.  It sure beats what I did on my summer vacation!  And speaking of education, what classroom could possibly compare with this?  Zach did take his school books along for the ride, by the way.

 I hear that Zac's parents, Laurence and Marianne, took some blog heat for letting their son do such a crazy thing.  My hat goes off to them.  Way to go, Sunderlands!  I understand that Marianne is a homeschool mom.  Double kudos for cutting those apron strings, Mom!

For all the nannies who get wound up about letting a 17 year-old sail around the world, think about this.  Columbus was 14 when he first hit the high seas.  In a year, this country could put an M16 in Zac's hands and send him off to Afghanistan.  He still has four years until he can legally crack open a beer, but don't get me started.  In my second paragraph I called Zac a "kid" because that's what we call 17 year olds in our culture of arrested development. He's not a kid, he's a man, and by all accounts, a decent young man at that.

There was a day when you stepped into the adult world around the age of 14 or so.  Today, some can't make the transition at 40.  It's high time we start treating our teenagers like adults instead of like overgrown kids with pimples.  They are apprenticing adults working side by side with us. Encourage them to take risks even if it means bumping into pirates on the high seas.  Challenge them to aspire, to reach for something, not just to dream but to actually do, to get out from behind their video consoles, pull out those ear buds and explore this world.  Teach them that the only way to learn anything is to risk failure.  The high roads and the high seas await them.  Don't hold them back in suspended childhood by saying, "You can't do that."   Push them, if necessary, into the adventures of adulthood.  The rest of the world will thank you for it.  So will your kids.

Thanks for sharing the adventure, Zac!  Take a shower, chill, and plan the next one, dude!  

And Laurence and Marianne - thanks for letting him go.