Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. Just. Keep. Swimming! Remember this quote? For some odd reason, I distinctively do. Probably because the movie it comes from was one of the very few Disney/Pixar movies I enjoy. If you guessed finding Nemo, you guessed it right!
If you haven’t watched it, I would question my childhood. No but seriously, it’s an animated movie about a clown fish named Marlin that travels across the vast Pacific Ocean to find his lost son, Nemo. You can imagine how impossible of a task this feels; which is depicted by this scene where Marlin, Nemo’s father, was distraught after searching and searching for Nemo throughout the pacific ocean, and he was starting to lose hope. Another fish, Dory, who joins Marlin on this journey to find Nemo says “when life gets you down, you know what you got to do? Just keep swimming!”.
The reason I resonate with this quote so much is because it is, what i believe, most people in the world need to hear right now. “Just keep swimming!”. Lets face it, if 2020 was a wave, it would be a tsunami wiping everything out in sight. It has definitely been a shit show of a year. We started the year 2020 on the verge of WW3, we lost one of the greatest basketball players in the history of the sport, Kobe (RIP Black Mamba), half of Australia burnt to the ground, race wars throughout the United States, then of course the outbreak of COVID-19, causing a global pandemic, which we are still in the middle of! Not to mention it being an election year, and the shit show of a presidential race it has been. It seems more than ever, we as a nation are both physically and spiritually divided.
Among these issues, the pandemic has hit us the hardest here on Guam, where I currently live. Several local businesses have been forced to close, our people are in the midst of a mental health crisis, many of us are or have become unemployed, while COVID-related deaths continue to rise. By identifying this suffering in our community, in our people, in our home, we have partnered up and developed our very own social enterprise: PassionXPersistence. Our mission is to contribute to the success of others, through motivation, education, and community engagement.
Now more than ever, we need to to unite as a community, and uplift one another through acts of service and love. Our team wants you to know that we understand the struggles our community faces mentally, physically, and spiritually. For those suffering financially and struggling to put food on the table, we have created our first Thanksgiving Food Drive Initiative! Under the umbrella of Project Passion, we partnered with Father Duenas Memorial School to collect donated goods for distribution of families in need during this Thanksgiving season. This will be the first of many community service initiatives we plan to execute. We feel that during this tough time, the only thing that we want to do, know how to do, is serve.
Information for Project Passion: Thanksgiving Food Drive is posted on our website; so feel free to contact us for more information or if you would like to get involved.
If I could give anyone out there in need of love and words of encouragement during this tough time, I would say “Just keep swimming!”.