I love the water. Any water, really.
The clean kind you drink.
The hot kind you shower with.
The summer kind that fills the pool.
The too-many-drops-to-count kind that fills the oceans.
I like to be around it and in it.
But I’ve never really lived by the water.
The closest we came was Charleston….. which is on the Charleston Harbor.
The Harbor is an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean formed by the confluence of the Ashley and Cooper Rivers. But as EVERYONE KNOWS….. it is “where the Cooper and Ashley Rivers come together to form the Atlantic Ocean.”
Yep.
I think the fact that we’ve never lived on the water is the reason I never knew the Boat Life.
Boat Life… by the way… means very different things…. for very different people.
For the likes of the Donald Trumps in the world, it means owning a fully-staffed yacht. Or more. Champagne and Caviar. The High Life. Just like his gold-encrusted home in Trump Towers…. but floating.
For Alvaro Lopez and his family fleeing Cuba on a raft, a few years back….. and ALL the rest…. it means life or death.
And for me? It would be somewhere in between the two. Maybe around the vicinity of a nice rowboat, or even a speedboat. Okay… a speedboat.
Yet the thing that sparked all of this, was my thought of being on one of the old sailing ships. Like the Mayflower kind. Or way, way later… like the boat my great-great grandmother, Appolonia Uhl, came over from Germany on. Somewhere around 1830. I wonder what those were like.
I bet there were long periods of tremendous hardships on those boats. But I also bet there were moments of beauty, mixed in along the way. And hopes. And dreams. And promise of things to come.
That’s how we humans are. Always looking forward and hoping for the better.
But the REAL truth is… RIGHT here in this moment. Right in front of us now. This moment is the only one we ever experience…. and we are supposed to appreciate the experience of this moment. The only one we know.
I’m not sure how that works out with hoping and dreaming. And finding the gratitude in the moment.
Like right now, I am really looking forward to feeling better. I am really hoping for tomorrow to be a better day.
It is hard for me to appreciate this moment when I am still feeling so sick. I’m learning lessons from all of this. But it sure doesn’t feel very good.
Maybe, life is a little like sailing on ship in the ocean. A million trillion billion drops of water all around us, and we can’t truly discern one drop from the next. But there we are floating, sailing through it. Stormy. Calm. But when you look out toward the horizon line, and see that profound beauty where water meets sky…. you see the moment. That Horizon. Right there with you, all the time.
“If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans.”
― James Herriot, All Creatures Great and Small
“If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough.”
― Meister Eckhart