Perusing the news this morning, I learned that the Titanic sank on April 15 in 1912.
I recall that the prominent Baha’i ‘Abdu’l-Baha, known as the Master, was at one point gifted with a ticket to sail on the Titanic, in planning a major trip to Europe and the United States, but soon rearranged plans to avoid it, and took a humbler route instead on the S.S. Cedric. Some have said it’s because there was a bit of a cloud of doom surrounding the ship, not least because of all the Great Things people were touting—its size, its technology, its capacity, its speed.
Ever since the Titanic’s demise, it’s become a bit cliche to refer to the disaster while talking about grandiose plans that seem all pumped-up before we can get around to testing and experimenting to see if they’ll really work. I’ve heard people talk like this most of all when referring to large-scale, institutionally-planned things that might entail a lot of money or have a variety of elements at stake.
But don’t we all have our own personal Titanics from time to time? A massive failure, a misjudgement of gigantic proportions?