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Waves and beaches
Wednesday February 1, 2006
Joan and I took a week's vacation in
the Caribbean – our way of chipping a hole in the middle of winter.
We didn't have ideal weather. Both air and water were delightfully warm,
but high winds kept the ocean stirred up too much for snorkelling. And we don't
surf. So we spent a fair amount of time on the beach, just watching incoming
breakers crash in a welter of foam, surge up the beach, and sluice back out
again.
It's an oddly soothing, almost hypnotic, way of passing time.
You cannot tell, in advance, how far up the beach each wave will come.
The biggest waves sometimes have all their force sucked out from under them by
the outwash. Less dramatic waves can hurl themselves up the beach with
surprising speed, racing up the sand, soaking dangling beach towels and stealing
sunglasses.
Nor do the waves necessarily follow a rigid rhythm, like a metronome or
a pendulum. There are always variations of timing, of size. Yet the pattern
recurs, as surely as day follows night.
It's this combination of infinite repetition with infinite variations
that led to the new study of Chaos Theory – the recognition that, for example,
weather patterns recur without ever duplicating themselves.
A metaphor for life
As I lay there on my
beach chair, with my mind drifting as aimlessly as the seaweed ripped off the
rocks by the waves, it occurred to me that perhaps watching waves is endlessly
absorbing because it's so much like life.
Because you can never tell when an experience will occur that will
affect your life. You can only be sure that such events will come.
You can never tell how much those experiences will affect your life.
Some undercut everything that you considered inviolable, like storm waves
ripping away the shore. Others gently smooth the footprints stomped across your
soul.
Some experiences that you thought would destroy you, don't. There's
tremendous turmoil, at first. Then the seething sea ceases, and life goes on
pretty much as it had before.
Other situations catch you by surprise. They whack you between the
shoulder blades when you thought you were in calm water; they rush much deeper
into your life than you expected; they leave you mopping up for years after.
A constantly changing you
Some waves will be big.
Some will be small. But only stagnant water has no waves at all.
The only guarantee with moving water is that there will be another wave
to alter your status quo.
And another wave after that.
Like life, every wave leaves its effect. As it rushes up the beach,
every wave carries with it grains of sand, bits of weed or drifting debris… At
the limit of its surge, as it starts to retreat, it leaves its cargo behind. And
thus every wave alters the shape of the beach.
Every experience similarly leaves its debris on your beach of life as it
retreats. Some build you up; some draw you down.
And thus each wave changes who you are.
Copyright © by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study
groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
To send comments on this column, email
Jim Taylor
directly. You can also receive Jim's column by email. Contact him at
jimt@quixotic.ca
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