The story starts with a phrase that wanders around the author, Lulu Miller’s entire life. When she was young, she asked her dad about the meaning of life. However, the answer coming back from her father was too dry and cold for a young child. He told Lulu, “there is no meaning in our life, and the universe never cares who you are”. Well, at least, this philosophy was meaningful to her dad because he interpreted the meaningless of life as feeling the joy of every moment. However, the same was not applied to Lulu. Whenever Lulu faced life hurdles, she was frustrated about how pointless life was.
The immense darkness in her life came with a break-up with her boyfriend. Actually, he was the "first meaning" in her life with an in-born melancholy and wandering ghost of dad’s futile attitude toward existence. However, a mistake she made in her journey, an affair with another woman, disastrously breaks down her possibility for bright living with her boyfriend. Though she begged for forgiveness, there was no mercy. She felt hopless that she had ruined her relationship, the only hope in her life. In this situation, her life went down a slippery slope.
Here, Lulu started to dig into the lifetime of David Starr Jordan. She was fascinated by his determination to move forward even in his most devastating time. David was an ichthyologist who devoted to classifying numerous fish species worldwide. He solely sorted more than 2500 fish species, almost 1/5 of known species at the time. However, due to the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, his fish bottles with name tags horribly broke down. It was a moment his lifetime work was about to go down the drain. However, in this desperate situation, he poured water day and night on the fish to prevent decay. Finally, he sewed the name tags of survived Fish directly into their flesh, assuring them never to go through the same situation. His determination was shocking for Lulu. She wondered how this powerful energy and will could be possible and wanted to implement them in her life. Likewise part 1 of this book raises David’s determination toward his work and the energy that Lulu looked up.
→ Continues to Part II
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