“One ship sails east and another sails west
With the self-same winds that blow.
Tis the set of the sail and not the gale
Which determines the way they go.
As the winds of the sea are the ways of fate
As we voyage along through life,
Tis the act of the soul that determines the goal,
And not the calm or the strife.”
~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox
In all this stillness, the Rolex Regatta began here on St. Thomas yesterday. It’s a bit breezier today, but I was marveling this morning at how skillful these sailors must be to move their vessel, even in these lightest of winds. I think sailors are great opportunists.
When I’ve been out sailing & racing with Spencer, it’s impressive how he can sense the shifting breeze and find little ripples coming across the water as sign of wind to come. How he checks his flags, and trims his sails accordingly. He’s taught me that you can’t sail directly into the wind or the sails flap.
Sailing is a great corollary for life in general. Lowell Thomas wrote:
“Separately there was only wind, water, sail, and hull, but at my hand the four had been given purpose and direction.”
I’ve been working with a friend and client, trimming and adjusting her sails. Now we just need to catch some wind.
As I noted the other day, you won’t find personal photos displayed at my house. We’d have to pull out albums and my computer to walk down memory lane.
But sitting quite prominently on my bookshelf is a framed photo, that I think originally came from Spencer. I look at it every day. It has a photo of a sailboat, sailing by full moon. And it reads:
Risk ….
You cannot discover new oceans
Unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.
What are you doing to get out of your comfort zone? To discover new shores? It takes courage to head out and lose sight of the familiar ground. This blog is just one of the ways I’ve ventured out this year …
And what’s so beautiful about these seas is that there really is no shore in sight.
Just sailing ♥
