With Purpose Success, part 23

She loves athletics and swims with dolphins, rides on the back of a mo torcycle, and has hobnobbed with presidents and other heads of state.
Friends describe her glowingly as "an international curiosity," "utterly fearless," and "one of the planet's true treasures." They say she was bold at an early age, not wanting to attend Wellesley College because it was a family tradition (but ultimately relenting) and "picking up" her husband, the internationalist and onetime U.S. ambassador to Switzerland, Shelby
Davis, by making the first advance on him while traveling by train from
Geneva to Paris.
Davis has a doctorate in international affairs and honed her interests in global issues and activism as a young child, when she traveled with her parents extensively and at the age of four marched with her mother during the suffragette movement. Later in life, she helped found a group that promoted greater communication between the U.S. and Russia in hopes of lessening the likelihood of nuclear war. She has devoted much of her life to improving American understanding of world culture and politics, with Russia and eastern Europe as a central focus. For many years, she lectured before educational and civic groups on India, Russia,
China, and Switzerland.
Throughout her life, Davis has been a major supporter of arts, education, science, and environmental conservation. But global peace initiatives have always held her highest interest. "There will always be conflict," she says. "It's human nature. But love, kindness, and support are part of human nature too." One of her goals at this late stage of life is to foster ideas that will wipe out armed conflict as a means of settling state disputes, just as duels to settle personal disputes are no longer tolerated.
That's a tall order, one that she hopes her student funding will play a role in filling. Yet even if the program ultimately proves ineffective in this regard, Davis's example is a shining light to all of us to do something for others for as long as we may breathe. "We don't always know what tomorrow holds," Davis says. "So let's take advantage of today and be as useful as we can be." A phrase she uses often sums up her view of life neatly.
There are three basic stages, she says: "Learn, earn, return."
Dying to Make a Difference