I recently read The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway. It’s about an old fisherman out of luck. He went out every morning but returned, unlike other fishermen, without fish.

In a raging protest against bad fortunes, he ventured deep into sea to fish in new, uncontested waters. After some days, he caught the largest fish he had ever seen. It dragged him for days, deeper still as he wrestled to kill it. He triumphed.

The fish was too large to fit into his boat. So, he tied it to the side. However, the trail of blood and war invited sharks. One after another, they stole chunks from his biggest haul. He fought the sharks; he killed several, but they kept coming.

When he returned to shore, tired and injured from wrestling with the fish, and battered from staving off the sharks—rather unsuccessfully—he had only the head and skeleton to show. But it was the largest skeleton his village had ever seen.

Hemingway asks us to examine those things we find valuable. For a fisherman, it is catching fish—or is it? Perhaps, as the old man discovered, the real value is in venturing out and, in battle after battle, realising that you can be destroyed but never defeated.