“We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.” -John Banville
The past couple of days have been spent traveling around this island in a loosely counterclockwise fashion. And the stopovers we’ve made along the way, nearly every time they have landed us near the sea. Our trajectory can’t be much of a surprise though, because as children of Cape Cod the magnetism in salt water is absolutely undeniable. We start to feel suffocated if we’re stranded inland for too long.
And over here there are similarities to New England. It’s the other side of the north Atlantic, and as such you’ve got blue veins that you won’t encounter on an August Mediterranean holiday. In County Antrim, visitors were whistled to retreat every time they ventured too close to the crashing spray on the Giant’s Causeway. Off the southwest fringes of County Kerry, our knuckles and teeth were clamped white as our modern day currach bargained with rolling swells and whitecaps during our journey to Skellig Michael. Even while scaling the limestone face of County Clare with hazelwood sticks in hand, we could scan just below and admire the forceful chop in the seaward approaches to Galway Bay.
No matter where you go, it is impossible to brush off the ever-present diligence in the ocean’s circulatory system. If you watch closely, it seems as though the surface is only large-scale chaos: a topography that is without a plan and commits to heading in no single direction ever at all. But once you pull back and take it as a collective, suddenly the wave tops become a visual symphony of sorts. The sea is dramatic and hypnotizing, and it is in this way that we humans are find ourselves coming back for more.
What I love best about the sea is that no two visits provide the same experience. Depending on the day, season, or geographic position, our egos are provided with a whole new doorway in which we can look at ourselves and the things in our lives just a little bit differently. Like the symphony of a sea state that is not built for the ears, the sea hands us a mirror that is not manufactured for the eyes.
As I continue to yaw through adulthood, I find my brain coming up with a number of questions to which there are no satisfactory answers. Most fall into the, “Where am I going?” category—and I marvel with malaise at the external forces that will inevitably impact wherever it is that I go. It’s easy to drive yourself mad in attempting to construct strategies for influencing the future, but ultimately I understand that this is a fool’s errand. And the sea, of course, always helps to remind me of this.
Controlling and accounting for one’s time on this earth is useful, I think, only when applied in measured doses. The rest become an exercise in patience as the unrolling of future is more a factor of watching the hands of a clock move along until, like the outgoing tide, a new reality is exposed. Time and the elements will decide what will be shown, and when.
Sometimes the best and the worst answer to our life’s questions is to simply sit with unraveled concentration and surrender. Even if you get nearly seasick, even if it seems as though there’s no way forward at the time. The good news is that you’ve got lots of interim time in which to exist, to move yourself along, and to change your viewpoint. For us, we’ve got the ocean, and on this particular day it’s an absolute treasure to be taking it in from County Galway.