Tangled in the Rigging?

"It didn't surprise me to look up into the early morning sky and see the waning moon tangled in the rigging, in a sky .  To choose a life on the water is to give yourself up to the tides, the outer ones and the ebb and flow of your own inner waters.  So when I glanced up and saw her so bright in a morning sky that perfect color of blue that lasts for an hour, maybe more, it came to me exactly what I had chosen, why I was here.  Yes it was love, and living, but something more too.  I left a dry place where I dreamt of water and came to a place where water abounds, a waterlogged land blessed with an astonishing abundance -- of green, of moisture, of birds, of a lush and tropical beauty."

I wrote this toward the end of November and found it after New Year's, more than a month later, after a span of busy-ness that always seems part and parcel of the holidays.  I re-disovered it after listening to an NPR story about how we change more than we think we do.  Here's the crux of it: The researchers found that "people underestimated how much they will change in the future. People just didn't recognize how much their seemingly essential selves would shift and grow.

And this was true whether they were in their teen years or middle-aged.

'"Life is a process of growing and changing, and what our results suggest is that growth and change really never stops," says Gilbert, "despite the fact that at every age from 18 to 68, we think it's pretty much come to a close."

Personality changes do take place faster when people are younger, says Gilbert, so "a person who says I've changed more in the past decade than I expect to change in the future is not wrong."

But that doesn't mean they fully understand what's still to come. "Their estimates of how much they'll change in the future are underestimates," says Gilbert. "They are going to change more than they realize. Change does slow; it just doesn't slow as much as we think it will."'

It struck me, reading this draft entry, forgotten in the pre-Christmas rush, the place I was then, compared to where I am now.  A month ago and I was strong and sure, prepared for the next step along my path.  A month passes and my skies are a bit cloudy, a 30% chance always seeming to herald a downpour.  If a month can bring such a change, what potential does a year have?  A decade?  How could we think of ourselves, even at the ripe age of fifty-four as static beings, just refining ourselves, altering slightly but in our essentials, the same?  

Where was I going with this month-old bit of prose?  Was I going to wax on deliriously at this moment of rightness when I knew I was just where I was supposed to be and who I was supposed to be with?  Was I going somewhere a little dark, sensing at my edges the doubt that marks me, my Libra legacy.  Certainly the word "tangled" sits a little oddly, a word that insinuated itself into body and title.

They ebb and flow, surety, doubt, at least for me.  There's a bit of Florida's watery nature within me, something tidal that is always either becoming or letting go, embracing or releasing.  I read once entropy, specifically chemical entropy, was the desire to hold and the desire to be held, two forces that increased and lessened.  In synchrony, we hold and are held, one stronger as the other weakens, the weak strengthening as the strong fails.  It seemed a more hopeful view of the force that drives things apart, that sends satellites through failing orbits, crashing to earth, that will tug at our universe, pulling us farther apart.  Now I feel it, that urge to hold and be held tipping this way and that.  I can see how at it's edges it can be pretty ugly, but in that Hegelian between is love and family, friends and community.  It's connections that span decades, giving and taking, tipping this way and that, always searching for its equinox.  I realize, writing this, that I am a bit black and white about things, a little judgmental.  If balance is the key, then only balance will do.  I tend not to see things as a journey, in balance's case, something that comes and goes and comes again, with a periodicity that can be counted on but the moment or two or three, there and then gone.  I forget to enjoy those moments, to settle in the knowing they will come again.  I so regret the loss or so hope for the return that all the time between, the real stuff of life, I never quite enjoy as I could.

Florida has been an interesting stop for me.  I always knew it was never my final destination although, once here, I began to act as if it was.  Always a planner, it's hard for me to have chosen a life without a particular end, choosing a life that must be sailed as opposed to visited, the journey really everything.  I keep thinking this is so unlike me, but maybe I've changed that much and I just never realized.  Maybe this is exactly like me, this me.  I guess we will see.