My journey through pain - 3. Chapter 3 - Day by Day

Day by day

Being out in the water is scary. There is a primal part of the brain which fears the unknown, and nothing is more mysterious than the inexorable pull of the current below the surface. At first, it might be easier to simply deny such currents exist. To fight against them, even. For me, as I sail on the boat of my life, the strategy was always very simple: hold on, keep course. I had a destination and I would not waver from it, regardless of where the water wanted to take me. I set myself the one and only task of building as much strength inside me as I could so that I could keep my iron grip on the rudder which controlled my direction of travel. And, for a while, it worked. Not only did I grow stronger as I fought against adversity, which I saw is the ripple in the waves, the undertow denied, the whirlpool averted… I also grew in arrogance, in thinking that all I needed to best the vast ocean was my own will. It worked all right – for a time. And then things changed.

I began facing a series of trials of increasing difficulty culminating in this one, where my own weakness is finally revealed. The lesson I am learning is humility, and only now do I begin to understand why arrogance is considered the worst of the seven deadly sins. There is grief in the boat with me now. There is also regret. But if I look carefully, I can also see a glimmer of wisdom. Sometimes I catch its faint shimmer, other times I feel that I can’t find it no matter where I look, but if I’m patient it always comes back. And it says to me: let go.

Let go of trying to control the course of your trip through the ocean of life. It’s okay to let your tired arms rest and let the current take you where it will. You can gather strength that way, for the next trial. And maybe, just maybe, you might look out from your boat one day and see that you have been taken to the shores of a beautiful land you would have never reached on your own.

I write this down right now to try and keep myself from forgetting. I am so used to controlling every single aspect of every single day that the very idea of letting go every now and then is terrifying. The mundane must be carefully planned and executed or else I interpret it as a total catastrophe. If I oversleep, my day is ruined. If I get to the gym later than usual, all motivation to exercise threatens to leave me. And so on, and so forth. Yet now, when I am essentially forced to take one day at a time without knowing exactly where it will take me, the thought has come to me that maybe that’s okay. Maybe it’s okay to simply have lived this day the best I could. Maybe not everything went according to plan, but maybe it’s not my plan this day is following. After all, the currents remain a mystery to everyone. Maybe I can dare to have hope, to reach out to the glimmer of wisdom in my boat, and trust that I will arrive to a safe haven after the storm has passed.