Islands in the Stream – Ernest Hemingway (1970)

The last book I finished was Hemingway's posthumously published Islands in the Stream. It follows Thomas Hudson, a painter living a solitary life in the Bahamas, and the first section of the book covers one summer when his three sons come to stay with him. It's quieter and less well-known than Hemingway's other works, but one passage from it has stayed with me since I put the book down.

Hudson's middle son, a boy of about ten, hooks a huge swordfish off the back of the boat, far bigger than anything a child that age should reasonably be able to land. What follows is pages and pages of the boy alone in the fighting chair, hour after hour, sunburnt, arms shaking, skin blistering, refusing to hand the rod to an adult, refusing to give up.

He fights that fish for the best part of a day. And right at the very end, agonisingly close, he loses it.

In the hands of another author, the outcome of this passage might land with heaviness and a sense of futility. But you see in the character how the struggle, the persistence, the overcoming of the temptation to give up - all this has left an imprint on him, permanently, in spite of the outcome.

There's something to read into that for anyone in our sector who feels a little weather-beaten or weary from their work.

Fundraising, running a small charity, trying to do good in a way that doesn't chase money, power, or scale for its own sake, it's always going to be hard, because it's pulling in the opposite direction to so much of how the world runs.

You won't land the fish every time.

But the sustained effort against the odds is transformative anyway.

Keep going.