Impossible is a Dare

by Cooley, Ben;

  But the vision of our bike ride was becoming a reality, one we shared at the Hope Conference. Shortly after announcing the launch of Zoe’s Hub, I also explained how we were going to raise the money to fund it. Zoe’s Hub would be funded by Zoe’s Challenge, and we invited others to join us. If I was going to cycle from Latvia to Southampton, maybe some other people would want to come as well. Well, we discovered that day that our supporters are actually quite sensible. None of them, apart from two other people, wanted to cycle the length and breadth of Europe. Go figure.

  Perhaps it was because Zoe’s Challenge was actually bigger than I thought, but the build-up to it actually went really well. In many ways it had come at the optimum time. Tom was just about to leave the soap opera he’d been playing in, with his character going out in a live episode broadcast to over ten million people. The media were interested in interviewing him about his time on the show, inviting him on to all kinds of breakfast and daytime programmes. We knew that each of them would ask him the same question: ‘What’s next?’ It was a brilliant opportunity for him to say: ‘Well actually, what I’m going to do is cycle from Latvia to Southampton following the journey of a girl called Zoe.’ Suddenly we could use this amazing platform to share the story of Zoe, the story of Hope for Justice and the issue of human trafficking. We were able to get our voice out to millions and millions of people. We were able to get a significant online following of people tracking our journey. It was really special. But then the day came. We landed in Latvia.

  I remember the night before the challenge began. We were in Riga. Riga is an amazing city; it’s so beautiful. We were staying in a nice hotel, had had some great food, and for a brief moment I’d started to think it would be quite a nice holiday if it was like this the whole time! But the sinister side of the city was impossible to ignore. The sex industry is rife, and in the evening people, ride around on rickshaws trying to get you into clubs to see girls. This was yet another reminder of why we were doing this. As I went to bed the night before the challenge, I couldn’t sleep. I’d like to say it was because of the excitement, but I wasn’t excited. I’d come to the realization that we’d been on a flight that day that had taken hours. I was now about to begin to cycle back. There was no return ticket here. We were cycling back.

  Isaac Stott was our cameraman for the trip and he was the life and soul of the party. Little did we know just how much we would need his enthusiasm in the coming days. Isaac is an incredible guy. He oversees much of the creative media output from Hope for Justice and is one of the most talented designers I’ve ever met. He’s also hysterical. Fuelled by his enthusiasm and our passion for change, we cycled the whole of Latvia on that first day. Day one done, and it had gone well. I was feeling pretty positive: I’d just cycled through an entire country in a day. I was feeling good!

  Next came day two. As we cycled through Lithuania, the positivity waned a little but we carried on, one pedal-stroke at a time. Pedal, pedal, pedal: the monotony of the exercise was starting to get boring. But then we saw something that shocked me to the core. I watched on as I saw a car run into a little kid on his bike, right in front of my eyes. The child was lying on the road; the car stopped, the driver got out, picked him up and put him at the side of the road. Then he drove off. Some passers-by ran to help the child; it looked as if he’d broken his leg. We stood on the other side of a busy road and quickly realized there was little we could do to help. So, shaken and confused, we had to ride on, with a very clear reminder of just how dangerous this country could be.

  Then we got to Poland. Now, with my new-found discovery of online maps, I knew that Poland was massive. It’s huge. But nothing could prepare me for the reality of it. And I’m sure there are beautiful parts of Poland, but the route we had decided to take was just tree after tree after tree. Pedal, tree, pedal, tree, pedal, tree. To keep things fun we started doing awards for each other at the end of the day: who’s the slowest (I got that); the most unfit (me again!)? But even with our own evening award ceremonies to look forward to, nothing could have prepared us for the boredom. This country was never ending. As we continued cycling, I felt robbed of my initial passion. Lost in the monotony of it all, there was a moment when I hit new levels of boredom. ‘I can’t be bothered’, I thought.

  Then I looked down. And there it was: all the motivation I could want to get me going again. There was a wild wolf. A wild . . . wolf! Running next to me. Dribbling! Suddenly I seemed to find energy. I loved cycling again! In that moment of boredom and tiredness, I now had a dual motivation: the end of modern-day slavery and personal survival. Pressing on, pedalling on, we got through Poland.

  Then we hit Germany. Well into the throes of the challenge, this is where things started to change. Something was reinforced for me in Germany, and the gravity of that lesson was undeniable: the danger with implementing any vision is not at the start or the end; it is right in the middle of the journey. Starting something can be easy. At the start you’ve got nothing to lose: you’ve got passion, you’ve got energy and you have everything to gain. Nor is the danger at the end. At the end, the culmination of the vision is in sight. You can see the outcome; you can see what you’ve been working towards. No, the danger of realizing any vision is right in the middle of the journey. It’s right when you’re not nearly finished and the start is as far away as the end. Germany proved the perfect metaphor for our journey as an organization so far. Starting something can be easy. Finishing something can be fun. The difficulty comes in battling day by day within the hard, oppressive environment of human trafficking; in difficult decisions, in sustained effort, in seeing something through. Yes, the danger is in the middle of the journey.

  Then it started to rain. Of course it did! The wind picked up. The terrain became more difficult. I remember going around this corner and the view before me revealing itself almost as if in slow motion. Up until this moment, our path had been relatively flat, but as I turned this corner what I saw before me was what can only be described as, well, a mountain. We cycled nearer and nearer. And then, almost as if to tease us, we stopped for lunch at the bottom of the mountain. I gazed down at my lunch; I gazed up at the mountain. Suddenly even I’m not hungry any more. I walked over to speak to the guy who was planning our route.

  ‘Hi, mate,’ I said cautiously.

  ‘Hi, Ben,’ he replied.

  ‘I’m just wondering . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m just wondering, we are cycling around that mountain, right?’

  And without even a flicker of emotion, he simply replied, ‘Nope.’

  ‘Great! Thanks, mate. That’s cool. I love mountains.’ I shrugged nonchalantly. Needless to say, that was a lie. I do not love mountains, not at all; and in that moment I couldn’t imagine anything worse.

  It was then that Isaac, our cameraman, decided to point the video camera at me and ask me to do a short clip to camera.

  ‘Hey, Ben, tell me what’s on your heart,’ he said, with his normal dose of enthusiasm.

  ‘You do not want to know what’s on my heart right now, Isaac,’ I thought, biting back the words. Tell me what’s on your heart? And as I stood in the shadow of the mountain, camera pointed at my face, I started to sing:

  ‘If faith could move the mountains, then let the mountains move.’

  I turned around. The mountain was still there. I start again.

  ‘If faith could move the mountains, then let the mountains move.’

  I turned around again. That mountain isn’t going anywhere. The mountain did not move.

  That was the second thing our ‘stint in the middle’ taught me. Sometimes faith doesn’t move the mountains; sometimes you are defined by your response to them. Whether you hold a particular faith or not, you may be expecting your circumstances to change, expecting your mountain to move before you do something. You may be sitting at the bottom of the mountain of slavery, poverty or fear or addiction, waiting for that mountain to move. But in reality we need to realize
that we’re stronger than we think we are; we’re more able than our minds tell us we are.

  When I first told people about Zoe’s Hub and how we planned to fund it, people told me not to do it. They didn’t think I could. I know that many of you might look at me and think I’m a healthy specimen of a human being (right!?), but before this challenge I did tests – health checks – and they appeared to suggest otherwise! The same tests that revealed that Tom (the actor) was incredibly fit, also revealed that Ben Cooley (the activist) was incredibly fat. I’m not exaggerating: they actually said I had a ‘fat heart’. Already sceptical, my fat heart was the last straw. Cycle across Europe? People told me I simply wasn’t able.

  Maybe you can relate. There might be many people around you telling you that you’re not able to achieve great things in your life. Let me tell you: you can climb that mountain, you’re stronger than you think you are. I have learned that I am stronger than I think I am. Often I sit in boardrooms feeling totally intimidated because my education isn’t right, because my age isn’t right, because my accent isn’t right or my credentials aren’t right. Sometimes we wear those things as badges displaying the reasons why we can’t do something. But you are stronger than you think you are. You have more potential than you realize and you can achieve more than you could ever imagine. How did I get to the top of the mountain? One pedal at a time. How are we going to end slavery? One life at a time. How are we going to end poverty? One person at a time. I firmly believe that we as a generation need to stop discounting ourselves, stop sitting at the bottom of the mountain. Rather we need to get up and start pedalling.

  A few days later we were still in Germany which, as it turns out, is also a big country! We were cycling away and the wind had changed. Before this challenge, I didn’t think the wind changing was a big deal, but it makes quite a difference. Who knew? Two or three days before this we were riding 22 miles per hour, but on this day we were putting in the same energy and going 6 miles per hour. The wind made a difference. We were hitting mountain after mountain, doing 12,000-foot climbs in a day. We were seriously disheartened. I was tired; my back hurt; my legs burned.

  Then we hit this one particularly steep mountain. It was a 23% incline that quite literally went on for miles. I was in so much pain I was screaming out loud. I don’t know what I was screaming, but all I can say is that if you happened to be in the middle of the German mountains and heard what I yelled, well I’m sorry. I was ready to give up. I was angry. I hated cycling. But I wasn’t cycling because I like cycling; I was cycling because I wanted to make a difference. As much as my passion for rescuing victims such as Zoe and Emma had inspired me to take on the challenge, with both the start and end of the journey nowhere in sight, the burden felt too much to bear. I had nothing left.

  There have been many times like this in my life. I remember one time when I, my wife and my kids had to move out of our home for a short time because of a threat to our safety. I remember sitting in my office with Gareth, one of our team, and feeling a similar thing: I’d had enough. I couldn’t see how we would carry on. It was too much. You may have experienced something similar: you may have the vision, you may have the passion, but you’re at a point at which it just hurts too much. That’s where I was. It wasn’t just about cycling. I felt the pressure of the whole future of Hope for Justice weighing on me; the responsibility of opening the new hub, of rescuing more people, of funding it all, felt as if it was on my shoulders. I was trying to carry it all myself, and I didn’t have the strength.

  I find the story of Moses in the Bible a great source of comfort. Moses had also got to a point at which the burden he had to carry was just too much to bear. He ended up just shouting at God and saying: ‘God, I just can’t carry it any more. It’s too much for me.’

  And God spoke to him: ‘I understand. I see that you are hurting. Choose some of the leaders around you who can share the burden and I will take some of the same spirit that is on you and give it to them too and they will help you carry the load.’ You know, as I was on this mountain, and I was just about to give up, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned and I looked behind me. And there was Jim, one of the cyclists. At that moment I felt another hand on my other shoulder: it was Gav, another of the cycling team. They were both cycling one-handed, with their other hands on my back, pushing me up the mountain.

  I learned something in that moment – that some mountains are not meant to be climbed alone, that they’re meant to be climbed with others. The vision of Hope for Justice, the vision to see the abolition of modern-day slavery, cannot be achieved by one individual. This mountain of the end of slavery can only become a reality if we climb it together, one hand on one another’s backs, pushing towards the summit. On your own you’re always less effective than if you’re working in a team. This mountain is far too important for us to be walking alone. In those moments I learned that not only can I not climb it alone, actually I don’t want to climb it alone.

  We continued to cycle through Germany. And though, looking back, this pain was trivial and fleeting in comparison with the cause, in that moment I felt as if I were dying. The weather was terrible and physically I was now broken; mentally I was broken. I felt so cold that the team around me was actually beginning to think I was getting hypothermia. I had some weird conversations in those moments. I remember Tom asked me: ‘How are you doing, man?’

  ‘Menorca’, I replied.

  Now, I knew he had asked me how I was doing. So to answer with the name of one of Spain’s Balearic islands was all the proof anyone needed that I was broken. That, and the fact I was blue. I was being sick eight or nine times a day. I couldn’t keep food or water down.

  Here’s something you need to know about me: I love Nutella. My team know I love Nutella. Anyone who knows me knows I love Nutella. They also knew that past halfway, the journey would be hard. The office team sent us a video every day and that day I received a video that said ‘Hey, Ben, you’re awesome; you’re doing an awesome job. We thought you might need a lift, so we have given Isaac some Nutella to give to you. Enjoy it!’ Isaac was shaking his head. He had given me the Nutella on day two. I was in that place, that dark place on day two. This was day nine. There was no amount of Nutella that could bring me back from this.

  I remember cycling next to Tom and him turning to me: ‘Ben, you have got to control this pain.’ I would love to say this was a purely benevolent act on his part but it might also have had something to do with the fact that I was screaming in his ear. I was really screaming. I know that may sound dramatic, but you have to remember that I trained as an opera singer; dramatic comes pretty naturally to me!

  Tom continued: ‘Mate, let me give you a tip about pain control, all right? What they do in the SAS is they teach you to build a wall around the pain.’

  I cycled for a few minutes. I was thinking: ‘All right, build a wall around the pain.’ Build a wall. Around the pain.

  ‘Tom,’ I said, trying desperately hard to construct a wall mentally.

  ‘Yes, Ben,’ he replied, full of hope: was it working?

  ‘I can’t build a wall in real life, never mind an imaginary wall around my pain. How the heck do I build a wall around my body – in fact my soul – because my soul is in pain?’

  Yes, my soul was in pain. That’s how dramatic I felt. Everything within me had given up.

  I’ve felt like that many times when I experienced hardships on the Hope for Justice journey. I imagine you have known the feeling in your own life, in your own mission. That moment when you’re not just physically tired but mentally, emotionally and spiritually tired. And at that point your soul hurts.

  Well, here was that feeling again. I was at that point. I was done. I stopped cycling. I started freewheeling through this town. Almost immediately Tom noticed. He saw that I’d stopped cycling. He started shouting at me:

  ‘BEN! BEN!’

  ‘What, Tom? I’m done. I’m finished.’

  ‘Ben! Have you seen the town
that we are cycling through?’

  My head was down; disengaged.

  Tom shouts again: ‘Ben! Look up!’

  Although I lacked the energy, I managed to raise my head. I looked up. And through my bleary eyes I saw the name of the town: Artern.

  ‘Ben. It’s Artern. It’s our turn. It’s our time. Don’t you dare give up. You’re not cycling for you, you’re cycling for Zoe, you’re cycling for Emma, you’re cycling for every victim we’ve rescued and every victim we’re still to rescue. It’s our turn, Ben, it’s our time.’

  It’s our turn. It’s our time. We are the generation who will see an end to slavery.

  There was my motivation. There was my ‘why’. At times like this, whether it be on a bike in the middle of Germany or in an office making strategic decisions, it isn’t the ‘what’ that motivates. It never is. It’s the ‘why’. Why do we do this? We do this because we believe every life counts.

  Suddenly, there on the bike, with nothing left to give, I found my energy. This was not a physical energy: my soul had been re-energized because I rediscovered my purpose. Remember the ‘why’. If you’ve started a project; if you’ve started something, anything; if you’re in the thick of it, in the middle of it, I want to encourage you to write out your ‘why’s. Write down why you started. Write down why you care. Write down your vision. And then go back to it. Read it again and again. Because when I remembered my ‘why’, it propelled me. It energized me. It kept me going. We got through Germany. We got through Holland. We got through England. And I crossed the finish line and stood on the stage. Why? Because I remembered my purpose. Vision and purpose get you through. They can get you through that difficult time. They can get you through when you can’t see the other side. They can get you through being sick eight times a day so you still get up the next morning. You can go through the pain and the agony of the journey. Why? Because what you do makes a difference. I have realized that it is our turn. Our generation is going to go through some pretty tough experiences. All around the world, people are being persecuted. There are political problems, economic problems and social problems that we’ll have to face. But I tell you this now: we’re going to see our vision become a reality if we remember our ‘why’. We will achieve it if we remember our purpose. That’s what that day taught me. I now face difficulties with a different attitude. I have a different mentality. I’ve been put on this earth for a purpose. So have you. I believe every person has a purpose. If you don’t think you have a purpose, change your thinking. We all have a purpose; and that purpose could change the course of history.