The last time the world ended I spent most of my time loading YouTube videos and beer bottles two by two onto the Ark that God told me to build. And then when the water level started to rise, I got exactly what I deserved based on the decisions I made.

It’s not that I didn’t love those things or that they didn’t deserve a ride on my vessel, but that they were artifacts - accidents of my love and not the real actual substance: the stuff underneath. And now I have been given another shot, one which I could persuasively argue either way that I deserve or do not. But regardless, here it is. Only this time I am being challenged to really drill down to the core and extract the essence. Because man can not live on beer and YouTube videos alone. Intoxication is different from ecstasy. And fulfillment is radically different from entertainment.

I find myself saddled, as well, with the need and desire to find some kind of new criteria for life and for action. I once thought you could just base decisions on what “sounds better” or what “seems like more fun.” And that works - for a while - but it doesn’t last. It’s not something you can hang your (reclaimed) hat on. And you also can’t make serious decisions based on what you’re afraid of. If anything lately I have learned to run headlong into my fears only to see them melt before my eyes like phantoms (in much the same way as those things I thought would be “fun”).

There is, I have had the pleasure to discover, a vast difference between courage and fearlessness. Fearlessness is for oblivious idiots and saints with unshakeable faith - neither of which I believe myself to be. But courage is simply being honest with your fears, facing them, saying hello, shaking hands. To address something openly and directly is to strip away its secret sacred scary power of taboo. Cause effect truth exchange. The only thing that impacts our reality is telling the truth. Truth reveals the currents of love flowing in through or past us.

Though my trip was cut drastically short by foul weather and mitigating circumstances, I learned two very important lessons sailing. Both are very simple. The first is trust your boat. It floats. This is what it’s designed for. The story goes that when the “old-timers” would see our boat (a 32 foot Tahiti ketch), they would exclaim, “She’s a good boat. She can handle more than you can.” Which is obviously true. She doesn’t have deadlines or families or lost loves to pine over. She just floats and takes you where you want to go. Which leads me to the second life lesson gleaned from this expedition: steering. Where do you want to go? If you sit there and ruthlessly push the tiller back and forth, you’re going to zig-zag all over like crazy. But if you just set a course, tell the boat where you want to go, and then just let it go, she’ll do most of the work for you. All you have to do is nudge the tiller once in a while to get back to your heading.

I have, it strikes me, been pushing too hard on the tiller. As I phrased it several weeks ago, I have been trying to force the hand of God. And for it I was thrown overboard and have had to start from scratch, yet again. I don’t regret these circumstances so much as I am thankful to have the ability to start over again, re-applying the lessons I have learned from all my many voyages this year both on an off shore. It is time to find what I truly love - the essence of it, the elixir of life - and hold fast to that. Because nothing else lasts. The accidents and waves they all fade away but the vast blue ocean she always remains.