Thoughts from the coast of Maine

As I look out on the beautiful bay that stretches before me bathed in sunshine and dotted with the white sails of yachts, I realise anew what an incredibly beautiful world this is. It was dead calm earlier and hardly a ripple disturbed the surface of the bay but now the breeze has picked up and little wavelets are scurrying across the water. It reminds me that the sea so often mirrors the events in our lives.

For a while everything seems to be calm and peaceful, we do not seems to have a care in the world and then suddenly the wind picks up and we are trying to cope with choppy water that is making it difficult to retain our balance in the boat of life. We learn to steer our boat into the wind so that it is no longer fighting the waves but is working with them. Sometimes though we are made aware of a storm brewing and then steering into the waves won’t help us, we need to find shelter where we can ride out the storm. As we mature we learn to recognise the signs that tell that a storm is imminent and also get to know where it will be best to seek shelter. Sometimes it is necessary for us to fall out of the boat or try to ride out the storm in the open, before we learn to recognise the warning signs and find out the best places to shelter.

Almost as suddenly as it began, the storm begins to subside and our boat is on an even keel once more. We are grateful and make a resolution not to be caught by a storm in the open again. We have learned from the experience, have become stronger and more resourceful. We have become aware of some of our limitations and know what to look for in future. Life is all about growth and learning and it is a fact that most things we have to learn by personal experience. It seems that although the experiences of others are available to us, there are many things that we only learn from making our own mistakes; we seem incapable of learning from the experience of others.

I believe it is important because of this, not to be too hard on our friends, family or others when they make mistakes, even mistakes that we feel we would have avoided given similar circumstances. It is far too easy to criticise from the safe distance of our own self assurance. Instead, we should try harder to understand and to accept that the individual has enough trouble handling the problems brought about by their mistake, without us adding to them with our condemnation. Our reaction to the mistakes made by others is a measure of our own maturity and wisdom and I can do no better than to accept the definition of wisdom propounded by August Swedenborg: “Love is the light of the world; wisdom is the light in which love sees.”