It was hard to run this morning. Of course it would probably help if days or weeks even sometimes months didn’t pass between my attempts. I was surprised my legs felt so heavy today. I had actually slept well, hadn’t partaken of any alcoholic beverages the night before, and had a healthy breakfast at the News Cafe. Never the less, they felt heavy. My mind was filled with meaningless banter. Why is it so hard to do this consistently? What am I going to do about losing weight? Getting a job? Paying of my school loans? Etc., etc. No real thoughts, just mental mumblings and grumblings, this and that, thoughts ricocheting off each other like bullets fired in a cave. .
In the midst of my self-directed ranting I saw it. There in the distance, rounding the point at the end of South Beach, making its way toward the channel. A four mast sailing ship! I had seen three mast sail boats and had been on a two mast before, but never had I seen a four mast sailing ship except on T.V. and docked at waterfront museums. Something suddenly possessed me. I had to see that ship as it passed the pier into the channel. I had to. Why, I wasn’t sure, but I knew I had to!
I was better than two miles away from the pier and I had already run a mile - probably the farthest I had run in a month. I started pushing, running faster. I was wearing a heart monitor and could hear my pulse at first ticking then pounding through the aerobic stages – 120, 150, now 160, 170, 180 beats per minute! I was still at least a mile away and the ship had turned the corner around the pier. I had to make it! My heart rate kept increasing - 185, 190, 193 – 193 was my maximum heart rate and I was still half a mile away with bare minutes left before the ship moved past my target point.
As I ran my mind emptied of all thoughts but the race. How exhilarating to have an all-encompassing goal just for that moment in time. Nothing else mattered except pushing every particle of my body to meet that ship.
“What if you make it?” I asked myself. “What is the point?”
There was no point – just the sheer self-satisfaction of having set a goal and reached it. But what if I failed? What if I tried as hard as I could and didn’t make it? What if the ship passed by just as I reached my destination? So what if it did? What would that say about me? It wouldn’t mean that I couldn’t reach the goal. It wouldn’t mean that I was a failure. All that could really be said if I couldn’t reach the ship in time was that I hadn’t been running much lately. If I missed it just as it passed, well hell, I could make up that amount of time in just a week of running every day! If I missed it by a mile, I could run everyday and eventually be able to catch it. To be unable to accomplish something doesn’t mean you are incapable, it just means you haven’t been primed for it, haven’t had the exposure, the experience to do the task at hand just yet.
Suddenly I realized I could run just a little harder – not because I had to make it, but because I realized it didn’t matter so much if I didn’t make it. My heart was pounding anaerobically at my maximum heart rate as I pounded through the sand and up the last little incline to the sidewalk that borders the channel. I all but collapsed as I stopped, panting, heart racing, barely able to focus, and just in time to watch the last two-thirds of the ship pass me by. As my vision came into focus I saw lined across every deck sailors in their whites, standing at full attention, saluting. There were hundreds of them! Still like statutes, hands across their foreheads, legs in a wide stance.
The ship wasn’t American. I’m not sure what nationality it was. I stood there on the sideline, panting, in awe, and feeling as if they were saluting me for my success. I watched until the ship had passed and made its way down the channel. As I walked towards the pier, I began thinking again of what I had said to myself as I ran.
The clarity with which those thoughts had passed through my mind was gone. Yes, I know, all the positive-thinking, if-at-first-you-don’t-succeed propaganda, but this was different. It was a peaceful acknowledgment of both the value of a goal – something to aim and strive for – and at the same time the irrelevance of them – goals are something to aim for, not something to set the value of your soul by.
I thought of all the times I hadn’t tried something because I was afraid I might fail. How many times had I missed the opportunity to stand on a channel and watch 200 men in Navy whites salute me as they passed by on a four-mast sailboat – just because I was afraid to fail? Afraid I would try to catch them and couldn’t. How many times had I missed life’s opportunities because I didn’t prepare for them?
“That’s really all there is to it, isn’t it?” I asked myself. Trying, striving, preparing for the opportunities. “The answers are all inside of us aren’t they?” I queried the space inside my own mind.
“Yes,” I heard a voice say. Now don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t a booming, part-the-clouds, down-from-heaven-above voice; it was a voice in my own mind. But a voice more calm and knowing than my own mental voices.
“Is it really that simple?” I asked. “We just look inside and the answers are all there?”
“Yes, it is really that simple,” the voice stated matter-of-factly.
“But why does it seem so complicated?” I asked.
“Because humanity has a way of making simple things complex. It is in man’s nature. People can’t conceive that it could be as simple as hearing a voice in their own mind and so they look for the answers outside of themselves. They are then only chasing illusions – like in a fun house of mirrors, reality becomes complicated.”
“Are you God?” I asked, thinking what a child I must sound like.
“You can conceive of me in whatever way makes sense to you - God, your guardian angel, your sub-conscious self. All that really matters is that you know the answers are there, inside, if you stop long enough to listen.”
“But it can’t be that simple!” I exclaimed.
“Can’t it?” responded the voice. “Listen to your heart right now. Does it feel true?”
I stopped and listened – not with my ears, but with my heart. I did not think, I felt. It did feel true.
“Think of humanity, of mankind,” said the voice. “With every invention, every step forward, every supposed simplification of life, life has become more complex. It’s true you don’t struggle with the realities of life and death as you once did. Instead you struggle with time, with relationships, with the ugly side of reality that thanks to radio, television and newspapers beats at you from every direction. Things certainly aren’t simpler. All of that din creates a humming. It is like a frantic energy suspended in the air creating a fog on the spirit like the mist that hides the shore from a sailor on a winter’s morn. The answers are still there, your spirit just can’t feel them, just as your eyes cannot see the shore in the mist. You have to still your mind. Be at peace within your spirit to feel the answers, to hear my voice, to see yourself.”
I was walking along the pier now, truly having a conversation with this, this voice in my mind. It wasn’t like most conversations with myself (yes I admit I have a tendency to converse with myself). It was clearly an exchange with something beyond just me. Perhaps it was just the greater, more enlightened me that exists beyond life’s hubbub, but it was definitely a more-than-me entity. Even the voice I heard in my mind was different from my own. I didn’t think of it as God for I have my challenges about the Christian-Judeo version of God. But if I were a believer, a churchgoer, I would likely have believed He had come down from the heavens above and was speaking with me. It was that real, that clear, that unquestionable.
As I reached the end of the pier, I turned back around to see the four-mast ship as it made its way down the channel. As I looked back I saw from one side of the channel to the other one of the most beautiful rainbows I had ever seen. It was full in form, its colors vibrant and clear, its ends touching the ground on both sides. I gasped at the beauty of it. Where had it come from? It hadn’t even rained that day. The sun had been shining and the skies clear all morning. But there it was nonetheless.
“Beauty always lies before you,” said the voice. “It always lies within you. It is only a question of whether you choose to see or not.”
“But I try to see the beauty in the world around me.” I complained. “Sometimes I just can’t find it.”
“There is a difference between trying to see and choosing to see; a difference between seeking and looking. Sometimes you seek, you try too hard. You envision in your mind’s eye what you want to find and then seek to find it. Beauty is not like that. It finds you. You need only open yourself up to it. No expectations. Only acceptance.”
I had been looking around as I listened to the words, trying to take in, to feel, what was being said. As I looked back to the rainbow it was all but gone. I felt a moment’s disappointment. “Opportunities in life pass quickly,” I muttered to myself as I often do, “you missed it.”
The voice went on, incorporating my thoughts “But opportunities pass all the time. You have to see them, be prepared for them more than you can necessarily make them. It’s kind of like catching the bus. You can’t make the bus come at a different time, but you can prepare yourself to be at the bus stop when it does come or you can linger too long and miss it. If you miss it, you either have to find a different way or catch a later bus. Either of those choices will still get you where you are trying to go, but if you sit at the bus stop and don’t see the bus when it comes, if you are too scared to step up to get on, if you don’t know where the bus stop is or what bus you want to take, you’ll spend your life looking for the right bus rather than experiencing either the ride or the destination. You may not see all the missed buses at that moment but as death begins stealing your last breaths away, you’ll know it. You’ll feel it inside. You missed the bus. You missed life.
As those words settled in my soul, their weight and truth heavy in my heart, I looked up. There, again, was the rainbow - just as it was to begin with, a full arch across the horizon.
“Was it really gone,” asked the voice, “or did you just not see it?”
“I don’t know,” I responded confusedly.
“Think again, no, feel it,” the voice commanded. “Do you have any idea how many things are there that you just can’t see? Either you are too preoccupied with life to notice or have had too little experience with life to recognize them. You have to live life fully to recognize beauty. Engage it. Feel, see, breathe, be everything around you. It is always your choice. Choose to see life’s beauty, the opportunities before you, the abundance that awaits you and you will live a full and happy life no matter what specific path you walk. You can be a beggar or a rich man, a loner or a social butterfly, the key is to live what you are, to be who you want, and to see, to see everything.”
“I know that. I feel that. In this moment I know the truth of what you say. But in this moment I’m on a pier a thousand miles away from all my life’s responsibilities listening to the waves crashing on the shore. How do I keep this feeling once I’m home?” I asked in earnest.
“You must clear your mind. Your mind is too cluttered to hear either wisdom or calmness anymore. You have forgotten what silence sounds like. If you find the things you love, that which you have a passion for, you won’t need to create schedules and rigidity to keep yourself on track anymore. You must stop doing things for outward perceptions and start doing things for inner desire.”
“But that’s my challenge. I’m not really sure what my inner desires are.”
“Now you are lying to yourself. Your heart always knows what your inner desires are. Always. Either you are ignoring the answers or you are scared to make the sacrifice. Every heart’s desire requires sacrifice. Perhaps you get hung up on the price to pay, not the desire. Perhaps you cover up the desire with others’ or society’s expectations. Only you can sort it through. Quiet your mind and listen to your heart.”
“That’s not always as easy as it sounds,” I whined.
“No one ever said it was easy. In fact it is quite hard. But in the long run it is an easier road to walk than the way paved by anyone else but you – especially if it’s a road you found yourself on and stayed on by default or fear not choice. Quit thinking life comes in pretty packages. Things aren’t always neat and boxed and tied with a ribbon. Sometimes you find beauty in the ugliest places, sometimes in the strangest, but generally you find beauty in the common places. Places you would never expect. Accept the opportunities that call. Sometimes they are immediately fruitful, sometimes they are not, but you never know when their purpose was only to time your next opportunity.
“But sometimes I feel compelled down a path then travel it only to discover there is nothing there,” I said.
“There is always something there, always a reason be it in your life specifically, another’s or the world’s. Just because you don’t know where it fits in the grand scheme of things doesn’t mean it doesn’t fit. Always remember, life can change forever in the smallest of seconds. It’s not usually the momentous occasions that shift you into new directions. It is the seconds in the spaces between time. It is in the moment of clarity in your soul that your life shifts. You may not always know it. But if you don’t follow your heart you will never experience it to know it.
The voice was beginning to face and my many smaller voices began chattering about what was said, what I felt. The rainbow was still there in pieces. My heart was very calm, my mind clear. Everything looked a little sharper, a little more in focus. As I walked along the pier I noticed thousands of little silver fish. “Funny,” I thought to myself, “I’ve been here a hundred times and never seen those before.” I stopped a fisherman who told me a little about them.
As I came off the pier and around the rocks I saw huge piles of black. I had stood in that same spot the day before and ended up with oil all over my feet. I assumed that’s what the black was - oil. “How very sad,” I thought to myself. As it turned out I learned the big black pools were concentrations of the silver fish, not oil. For years I had walked that beach and not known. I knew the experience would never be quite the same again. With new knowledge you can never look at an old experience quite the same again.
As I walked along the shore I pondered the morning’s events. Life has a funny way of putting us in the right place at the right time. A few minutes one way or another and I would have missed the ship and the experience. It is strange we spend so much time thinking we have to force life or even can force life rather than letting it happen, rather than choosing the paths from those that lay before us. How many people don’t even see the other paths? How many stay safely on the path they are already on because they are on it, never even asking if it was one they chose in the first place or if it is the one they want to be on in the end? How often do I, proud as I am that I at least look for the paths, only let myself see two choices? “Taking the lesser evil of two is not much better than living by default,” I said to myself, “don’t fool yourself into thinking that is living by choice.”
The thoughts were flowing freely now. “If you make life a series of obligations you will be fulfilling obligations rather than living life. Let your heart call you when you choose your schedule rather than squeezing seconds in for your heart around the demands of your schedule.”
Recognize too that not all things in life come from being the fastest or the strongest or even necessarily the best. Many come from being the most patient or the most determined.”
“Never forget running for that sailboat,” I lectured myself. “How much further and harder you could run with a goal than without one… How great it felt to reach it. Don’t forget either that if you didn’t reach it, that didn’t mean you failed, only that you hadn’t prepared. Run some more and try again later. Success isn’t doing everything right the first time, it is continuing to try until you can do it right.”
Your time is yours. Your choices are yours. You choose to give your time away or to hold it in your hands. Savor it, enjoy it, use it for your heart’s pleasure and life will always be full, beauty will always knock upon your door. Remember, the race is long and in the end it is only with yourself
Comments