Have you ever just wanted to wipe everything off the table and start over? To get back to the core of who you really are? Have you ever felt like somewhere along the way you got off the path your heart called you to and you found yourself in an emotional desert wondering how you got so lost?
My heart calls me to the sea. It calls me to exotic places and beautiful faces and discovering what’s around the next bend. The farther off the grid I can get, the better. My heart calls me to experience life, not just talk about it. I want to be the one cutting the path with the machete through the jungle, not the one behind the camera lens filming it.
It is so easy to lose focus and find yourself observing life, not living it. I want to get so lost in the moment that I am not aware of any plans for the next moment, or the one after that. I want to be fully engaged, living through my senses, not stuck in my head, lost in my thoughts and missing even a tiny part of what is happening right in front of me.
I am so very fortunate to have traveled all over the world. At times, I have felt like I lived in a National Geographic Magazine. I can sit at my computer today and go through the photos of a life well spent, but I have no desire to look at the pictures. Rather, let me paint new ones. My brush will be a boat and my pallet will be the colors of the sea and the sky and my inspiration will be a chart full of empty spaces where few have ever been.
I have no idea what good I am offering to the world by living my life this way. I feel compelled by reason to do something to further the cause of mankind, but every time I stop living long enough to try and figure out how to share my experiences in a way that benefits the greater good, I lose my focus. I wander off my path and into a wasteland of my own making.
So my hope is that somehow, just by living, by being an example of what it means to passionately embrace people and birds and rocks and air and grass-roofed huts and foods I’ve never tasted before and languages I don’t understand, that I can open the eyes of those who meet me in passing, perhaps in some remote port or at some scraggly beach bar. And that in the opening, there can be a receiving, or perhaps a catching as one catches a vision or maybe as one catches a wave that unexpectedly pulls you under in its force and leaves you battered and flung up on the shore so out of breath from the tossing and so exhilarated by the ride that you want to run back into the foam and do it again and again. Perhaps in that opening of eyes, there can be a receiving, a catching of inspiration to move beyond observing and really live.
Would that be enough?
Could that be my contribution to the forward progression of the state of man?
Part of me hopes so. That part of me that reasons and gets caught in the struggle to compete for a legacy all-the-while feeling the pursuit of a legacy comes only from ego. And meanwhile, the rest of me has gone off again, skipping down the beach and admiring the frigates as they sore overhead, their huge wings barley moving as they catch the spiraling upward currents of the wind.
And I ask myself, “What was I so worried about?” and I don’t bother to answer myself because I have discovered a little crab burrowing his way into the sand.
Lovely Latitudes 