What Lies Beyond?

“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

These are the final words of Ulysses, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s famous poem about one of literature’s most celebrated adventures. Written in the Victorian era, Ulysses draws from Homer’s Odyssey, the ancient Greek epic that follows Odysseus on his long and difficult journey home after the Trojan War.

But Tennyson’s Ulysses is not the young warrior who sailed to Troy. He is an older man who has already fought wars, travelled far, seen kingdoms and experienced the world. He has returned home to Ithaca, reunited with his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus, and has every reason to settle into a quiet life.

Yet he cannot.

The familiar has begun to feel like a limitation.

For Ulysses, growing old is not a reason to stop seeking. If anything, it makes the desire to experience more urgent. He knows that life is finite, which makes every unexplored horizon more compelling. He wants another voyage, another challenge, another glimpse of what lies beyond the boundaries of what he already knows. The final words describe a refusal to surrender to complacency, and that has remained a powerful idea across centuries of storytelling.

The world has changed. Ships have become aeroplanes, monsters have become circumstances, and unknown territories have become places we can locate on a satellite map.

But the instinct remains.

Go further. Find out what lies beyond. Keep moving.

Daniel Defoe gave the world another unforgettable adventure in Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719.

The premise is simple enough. Crusoe is shipwrecked and stranded on a deserted island, far removed from the life and civilisation he once knew. It is an adventure shaped by uncertainty. There is no hotel, no village and no familiar civilisation to return to. There is only survival.

Crusoe has to build shelter, find food, protect himself and create a functioning life from almost nothing. His greatest tools are resourcefulness, discipline, labour and problem-solving ability. Defoe tells us what happens when everything familiar disappears, and a person is forced to discover what he is capable of without it.

There is something deeply human about wondering:

What would I do if everything I knew disappeared?

The question changes the meaning of adventure. With Ulysses, adventure is something you deliberately seek. With Crusoe, it is something that happens to you. In both cases, however, the unknown forces a person beyond what is familiar and into what they are capable of becoming.

Nearly three centuries after Robinson Crusoe, another deserted island appeared on the big screen.

In Robert Zemeckis’ 2000 film Cast Away, Tom Hanks plays Chuck Noland, a FedEx executive whose life revolves around schedules, efficiency and time. His carefully organised world changes when a plane crash leaves him stranded on an uninhabited island. Like Crusoe, Chuck must learn how to survive. But Cast Away adds another dimension to the

idea of survival.

Chuck is alone. Completely alone.

Here, Wilson enters the story.

Wilson, a volleyball Chuck finds among the wreckage, becomes his companion, his audience, and, in a way, his connection to the human world he has lost. This relationship reveals something deeply human: survival is not only about keeping the body alive. The mind needs something to hold on to as well.

Cast Away asks a different question from Robinson Crusoe. What happens to survival when there is no one left to survive for?

The power of adventure is that it takes us into extraordinary circumstances only to reveal very ordinary human truths.

We can endure hunger, exhaustion and uncertainty. But we also need a reason to keep moving.

There is, however, a difference between admiring adventure and deliberately choosing a life that demands resilience.

Few people embodied that distinction more literally than Nirmal “Nimsdai” Purja, the Nepali-British mountaineer and former Gurkha and Special Boat Service soldier.

In 2019, Purja set out to climb all fourteen of the world’s 8,000-metre peaks. He completed the feat in just 189 days, an extraordinary achievement later documented in the Netflix film 14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible. His journey was about attempting something that had previously seemed almost impossible within such a compressed period.

Between the ambition and the summit stood some of the harshest environments on Earth. Mountaineering demanded discipline, preparation, endurance and leadership under extreme conditions.

His famous words,

“Giving up is not in the blood, sir. It’s not in the blood.”

capture a mindset in which fear does not have to disappear for someone to move forward. Courage becomes a decision to continue despite it.

Purja’s death in the Broad Peak avalanche in July 2026 has given those words an even heavier resonance. But his life is best remembered not only for the tragedy that ended it, but for the extraordinary refusal to accept ordinary limits that defined it.

Generation after generation, people continue to cross oceans, climb mountains, build businesses, invent things, explore new places, change careers, start over and walk towards things they cannot fully predict.

Why?

Because certainty has its comforts, but the unknown has possibility.

There is a difference between being content and becoming stagnant. Sometimes, moving forward means challenging what already exists, leaving familiar roads and searching for a new one.

It means asking the question that has driven explorers, adventurers, inventors, and ordinary people for centuries:

What lies beyond?

That is why Ulysses refuses to stay still, Crusoe learns to build a life from nothing, Chuck Noland keeps surviving long after survival itself becomes exhausting, and Nimsdai keeps looking towards the next summit.

They are different people, living in different worlds, facing different kinds of uncertainty.

Yet the impulse remains the same.

To discover what happens when we go beyond what we already know.

Perhaps that is the real thrill of adventure.

Not knowing whether we will succeed.

Not knowing what waits on the other side.

But wanting to find out.

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.