LIFE'S STORMS

Life, I find, is often more about the storms than the peace they seek to overwhelm.

They lurk, ready any minute to shake things up - and take your breath away - to destroy you.  If not for faith, you'd drown, lost.  

And, in these cases, somewhat as a pilot, when about losing sight of a coast, whose general trending he well knows, and which he desires shortly to return to again, but at some further point; like as this pilot stands by his compass, and takes the precise bearing of the cape at present visible, in order the more certainly to hit aright the remote, unseen headland, eventually to be visited: so does the fisherman, at his compass, with the whale; for after being chased, and diligently marked, through several hours of daylight, then, when night obscures the fish, the creature's future wake through the darkness is almost as established to the sagacious mind of the hunter, as the pilot's coast is to him.

They'll hit you, the storms, knock you off your more's and send you overboard, desperate for anything to hold onto.   To be reeled up toward some semblance of peace....    

The trick I guess, is to not try to find a way around the curve balls life serves up, but to live with them - and have a halfway-happy uneasy alliance. And search for new things to cling to. And when you finally find it, to hang on just as tight when it's a benefit - not to bring you down. And around and around we go, holding on until the time comes to say goodbye.

Nobody likes letting go. From our earliest moments, from birth till we're six feet under, our instinct is to grab, grip, cling. To a finger, a bottle, a best friend, to a faded old photo. Sometimes we hold on for dear life to the very things that keep us from actually living it. But that comes with an up side - it's the way we feel when we finally let go.  

...and in the storm's last mist, we comb the wreckage.    Holding our breath, bracing ourselves and only briefly forgetting that there's another storm right around the corner.  But I believe in a rainbow's magic, its illusion thwarting hapless souls into spiritual revival, a second chance... We carry on - it's the human spirit.

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