In Between

Imagine you are a wave on the ocean, and you’re born of the salt and the wind. As you are born you see nothing but the blue of the sea and an endless journey before you.

You are small and insignificant – there are mightier waves all around you. You are young and light, aqua and translucent. You are a tiny wave traveling the ocean, protected and comforted, hidden by the bigger waves all around you.

And for the longest time you travel the ocean drifting between magnificent blue swells and gigantic angry waves, old and crested with white, bitter and ancient and sad. And wise.

As you travel you grow and swell and you become one with the others — searching for meaning on the deep blue sea. As far as you know the only meaning to your existence is to wash ashore on and die on some distant beach — alone and discarded, your beautiful substance corrupted by sand and seaweed and splinters and pieces of debris that had washed up on beaches long before you emerged from the turquoise foam.

You wonder, as you sail the surface of the sea, why you were born if your only purpose is ultimately to wash up on some lonely beach, thousands of miles away and die an ignoble death, your life sucked dry by the sand.

And on your journey you are surrounded by younger and older waves — babies and frothy waves wearing white caps and made bitter by their own wisdom.

You are somewhere in between, always somewhere in between. You see nothing but endless ocean, sometimes gray and sometimes aqua and sometimes turquoise, but always endless, always in motion, always alive.

You make friends and you meld with another wave and from you springs forth a new wave, meek and virtually invisible amid the foam and the froth and the swells. Waves come and go and you travel on, inextricably connected to everything and belonging to nothing.

You are surrounded by waves — large and small, young and old, yet you are alone. And you know it. You accept that someday you will wash ashore on some lonely beach far away, or maybe not so far away. You accept it because every wave before you has — the beautiful, the ugly, the bitter, the sweet, the gregarious, the sour — all before you have ended their existences on some sandy, unseen beach, far away.

You are cresting white, and now as you age you feel less vain and less lonely, less vulnerable and less connected. You’ve seen the young and the old, you’ve seen the new and the ancient, you’ve seen the sun, the storms, the rain and you’ve heard the icy creak of salt ice breaking apart under a warming spring sun.

You’ve seen so much, but you will never see everything and you come to terms with that,  you understand.

Always somewhere in between the young and the old, the new and the ancient, the seen and the unseen, the docile and the mighty – you sail on and on. The beaches you know surround you do not seem real, so you convince yourself to make the best of your cresting time – to enjoy the sun and to feel the rain and to experience everything you can — from the icy cold waters of some cold and forlorn ice-locked ocean, to the warm turquoise of the clear Southern seas

Imagine you are cresting on some sweet warm sea — surrounded by the vague and the obvious, the little and the big, the meaningful and the meaningless, the absurd and the profound — intrepid, yet unsure, always somewhere in between.

Beaches surround you, they’re everywhere. And all you can do is ride the oceans until you wash ashore on some littered beach — maybe miles and years away.

Imagine you are a wave, like any other, surrounded yet alone, always moving, always standing still, always young, always old, and always on a journey to a beach unseen and unknown…always somewhere in between.