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Bury The Dead Horse

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DEREK MAUL

The Tampa Tribune

Published: March 25, 2009

Last week, leaving a restaurant near the mall, my wife and I glanced up to witness a wondrous sight. It was the space shuttle Discovery, clearly visible. Its brilliant tail made a vivid slash across the eastern sky.

I've seen dozens of launches, day and night, from as far away as Tampa to as close as a few short miles. You'd think it would eventually become old hat, but a launch still sends that tingle of thrill down my spine and ignites a spark of hope for the future in my soul.

As human beings, we have this irrepressible instinct to reach beyond the confines of the here and now. We imagine, we experiment, we practice, and then we fly. It's as if something deeper and higher and greater and more wonderful is somehow calling, and we simply must move forward.

The people whose stories I listen to each week live lives that respond to a similar calling. They are entrepreneurs, teachers, ministers, specialists in every field, and volunteers. They are people who live forward, and they own the kind of vision that typically embraces failure or struggle as the potential beginnings of some new challenge, expanding the possibilities of creativity and belief.

These folks constantly teach me that, if we have the imagination to play this recession right, we can replace a dead-end status quo with something far more meaningful going forward.

I can't help but think of the Pony Express, the mail service that linked Missouri and California in the early 1860s. A relay of riders ran horses as fast as they could to deliver mail in record time. But there was a limit to how hard and fast the animals could run before they crumpled.

The 2008 economy buckled when Wall Street ran so hard and so fast the horses collapsed. Now, people want to get back on the same dead horse and find a way to ride it again, and just as fast.

But the answer for the Pony Express turned out to be rail, telegraph wire, phones, broad-band technology and fiber-optic cable. Progress means reinvention, not regurgitation.

Here in Florida, we're used to shooting space shuttles to infinity and beyond. Our future must lie in similar challenge and invention.

Alternatively, we could always get back on the dead horse.

Derek Maul can be reached at derekmaul@gmail.com.

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