Time and Tides

We go through our lives in specific times and the shifts that accompany those particular times. There is a time to be a toddler, but it never comes again.

We have a time to be a teen, both knowing everything and knowing nothing and terrified that someone will find our private truth out and expose us for the frauds and failures we believe we are.

We are college students seeking to find our academic path or young workers hoping to even see the ladder to a future upon which we can grasp even the lowest rung.

We are young marrieds trying to carve out a life of two turned into one. Some successes come and some not so successful moments. We learn by doing.

We are single and trying to navigate the coupled world that we can see but not be party to or participate in.

We are growing older and adding children to our lives and see them come of age and go out into the world to find their own way in the world. Or we sit at home with the child who will never grow old enough to be capable of making choices of any kind.

The moon exerts a pull on the oceans from a distance just as parental influence exerts a pull on a child for better or worse. Some of who we become has more to do with what we are avoiding becoming as it does with what we deliberately run toward in our pursuit of personal perfection in our own eyes.

When I look back over various times in my life through the pages of the journal I have kept since my youth, I feel all of the same emotions that were poured on the pages in ink and feeling.

But now, as I read them, I feel sometimes that I'd love to go back and erase the words and find something else in their place. It can't be done. Over time I have come to understand that the time and tides that go through us in our lives are just the markers of who we are and who we have become. We can't deny the understanding that we gain through mistakes we make, nor can we diminish the successes that keep us floating along on the tides when we might instead have been swamped by those same tides if our choices were different.

Something to think upon while looking upon the powerful moon as it draws the waters along from the shore to the sea in the time of tides for the earth.