How to Ride the Wave

It was the fourth dive of my trip and the tenth dive of my life. Visibility was spotty, and combined with my slug like grace 14m under the blue, blue ocean it was turning out to be a tiring and mildly boring dive. 

The instructor gestured for us to head back towards the boat. Not much use hanging around when we could barely see our hands in front of us. It was only after a couple of minutes of flailing about that I realised that everyone else was doing exactly the opposite. There was a strong current which luckily for us, was moving in the very direction that we wanted to go. As experience amply showed, all the other divers stopped moving and focused on breathing evenly. This ensured that they retained neutral buoyancy, conserved energy (and consequently oxygen), all the while moving towards their destination. 

I thought of this incident today, while contemplating the seesawing nature of my once predictable life. It was wake up, get ready, work, work, work, get home, sleep, sleep, sleep. Then it's weekend and soon it's Monday. So wake up, get ready, work, work, work, get home, sleep, sleep, sleep. Then it's weekend and soon it's Monday. For 7 years (I know that many people have done this for 23, 53, 60 years. For me 7 is a lot in a way that half yearly anniversaries are celebrated by the newly married.) I recall the ups and downs of work life, good one day, disastrous the next, snooze worthy on most days. Post my 6th year, I learnt the hard way (and thanks to A's brutal advice) that getting all worked up over every small blip on the excitement screen was a wasteful expense of energy. Growing older helped. As did losing sleep. What I detested the most was my overall powerlessness in making or breaking these things. Hard work rarely determined the output. Neither did sincerity, saving for a rainy day and calling wolf. These sound pathetically naive to me now, but at that time I was out of options. 

There are so many things I want to do, starting with determining how I spend my time. I want to be on time, no, 5 minutes early to meetings, movie shows and family dinners. I want to read sleazy romance novels for 30 minutes everyday before sleeping, in the warm comfort of my bed. I want to create something with my impossibly high standards; something perfect in my eyes. Then I want to share it with the people who really want to see it simply because they are curious, not because they are being paid to or because they accepted my meeting request when they were high on self importance. I want to write of course. 

Nothing can get me as close to what I want as I would like, whether in a controlled environment like a workplace, or out of it. Not by doing it my way, at least. Each day is a like a wave in the ocean. It comes from somewhere deep inside the world, created by many tiny thoughts and actions each adding up to the curve. It it continuous, day after day, but no wave is alike. I cannot determine the wave that would lap at my feet or prevent it from sinking me under. But I can ride it. Take steady breaths, achieve neutral buoyancy, and drift with the current.