Welcome to the Daily Quote, the podcast designed to kickstart your day in a positive way. I'm your host Andrew McGivern and this episode is brought to you by the Great News podcast. And you should listen because good news needs to be heard.
Today's episode is a first for this podcast. Every quote I've featured has come from history, from books, from interviews. From someone I've read or studied but never met. Or at least don't know personally.
Today's comes from someone I know. A good friend. Someone I was sitting next to when he said it.
His name is Francis Cheung. Frank holds a PhD in Bioengineering and Biomedical Engineering and he is a man whose mind operates at the intersection of science and human complexity.
And several years ago, Frank and I were camping on Quadra Island, British Columbia. We were up early, the two of us, watching the sun rise over Rebecca Spit – a long, quiet stretch of beach with the ocean on both sides and nobody else in sight. Nobody, except for one man. Standing alone out on the sand, facing the waves, completely still.
And Frank looked at the scene, paused, and said:
”It's like a metaphor for life. Every man stands alone.”
The people in the tents next to us laughed. I don't think they were laughing at Frank. I think they were just surprised that Frank was such a philosopher. I wasn't surprised at all but I still found the moment funny. There's something about a solitary figure on a beach at dawn that goes beyond the intellect and speaks directly to something deeper. The ocean doesn't care how many people are watching. The waves arrive regardless. And no matter how many people you have in your life there are moments where you face the ocean alone. Where the enormity of things meets you as an individual.
That's what Frank saw in that man on the sand. Not loneliness. Solitude. And there's a world of difference between the two.Loneliness is the unwanted absence of connection. Solitude is the honest recognition that some things can only be faced from within. Your interior life… the questions that keep you up at night, the values you're trying to live by, the meaning you're building from your particular experience of being alive. Nobody else can navigate that for you. You stand at that shoreline alone.
Every man.
Every woman.
Every person, regardless of how loved, how surrounded, how connected.
The great philosophers understood this. Montaigne, who we featured in this podcast, retreated to his tower to think. Thoreau went to Walden Pond. Jung descended into his own unconscious. Frank probably focuses on the force.
Not to escape the world, but to face something in it that could only be faced alone.
I've thought about that morning on Rebecca Spit many times since. The stillness of it. The sun coming up over the water.
One man out there on the sand doing something that looked like nothing which was actually, as Frank immediately understood, everything.
What Frank captured in that single sentence was something a PhD in philosophy might have taken a whole chapter to say.
This podcast, in its own small way, is my version of standing at that shoreline. Showing up every day, by myself… facing something, trying to make sense of it. Alone in the doing of it and even though your listening right now, I won't know about it. Okay, enough of the cheesy metaphors… I'm not as good as Frank at this, clearly.So here's the question: When did you last allow yourself to stand at the metaphorical shoreline? To be with the vast, quiet, unanswerable things, without filling the silence, without reaching for your phone, without making the solitude into something more comfortable than it needs to be?
Because Frank is right. Every man stands alone. Not as a tragedy. As a truth. And a truth, honestly faced, is always the beginning of something good.
That's it for today. I'm Andrew McGivern I'll see you in the next one with another Daily Quote.
