From Flailing to Sailing

I can’t tell you why I spent so much time “trying to figure it out”.

I didn’t trust me. I was scared. I was unsure. I was stifled. I was flailing.

Now, though, I am sailing. I am on this wonderful boat. It feels fabulous. I should have let myself get here sooner.

See, for a while, I didn’t trust the boat. I wasn’t sure it would really get me where I wanted to go. I thought that perhaps I’d be safer on land. Perhaps I’d be secure staying put. Staying in the sand, in the unrelenting quicksand. I was afraid the water would be cold like it had been before. I didn’t trust the boat with the Siren at its mast. I was intimidated by it’s journey, by it’s glory.

I redirected efforts on the sand. I built sandcastles that the water rapidly took away.

“Lauralie, you know that you need to get on the boat. Get on the ship. Stop trying to build sandcastles, they won’t last, no matter how beautiful. They will be gone soon enough. Because what you want, well, what you really want, it exists on the ship. And you know it. So get on the goddamn ship before it sails away without you.”

I should have known the answers were in the sailing. Like a fish out of water, though, I stayed close enough to shore to catch breath in the occasional wave. Beached from a broken ship. Avoiding repair of the incidental damage. Lying around in false idols on the sand.

So here I am now, the beach far in the distance. The air filling my lungs. Sighs of relief. Riding out tides and cold. Feeling uplifted that the ship was always the safer option than staying behind in sand castles. Here now, it makes more sense than sand ever made.

I jump into the water. I swim around a little. The swimming, the sailing, this is the life dreams are made of. The scary jump, the exciting free-stroke was always part of sailing. I should have stopped flailing long enough to jump it.

But there, on that beach, there were months of barely breathing. Months of denial and uncertainty and fear for naught.

It’s nice to be sailing. To be on the journey again. To be breathing. To have stopped trying to ‘figure it out’ and have it ‘all figured out’. It is, where a “Lorelei” was always supposed to be.

Stop the resistance. Jump in. Swim. Be excited and scared. Take the journey, don’t avoid it.

Everything is as it always should have been.