“We think,” he said, “that we are our own masters when we get in our hands the object of our desire – but we are really our own masters only when we are able to cast out our desires from our minds.”

Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World

I am swimming towards the shore, the current encourages my seizing legs and resigning arms onward. Ten feet before the destination I realize that I am approaching a waterfall and not the shore. I try to change my bearing  to reach true land, when the once encouraging current becomes the flow/direction/undercurrent of my demise.

Dramatic, I know.

The thing about reaching a goal is that it is mostly impossible. Dreamers will tell you otherwise, but it is because they have never reached their goals either, and are too blinded by their want to reach their goal that they can’t see the negative reality. They might call it determination. I might call it delusion. Once you think you’ve reached a goal, you realize that there is far more to it than you once thought. I am a real motivational speaker.

I have reached the written level of my French class. I thought I was arriving on the shore, but have come to realize that I have only come to a cascade into a pool of overwhelming mass with no shore in sight.

And while I wade in the waters deep of what I once considered grandeur, I toil through the daily misfortunes of soggy, sour shoes, of forehead pimples, of NHL catastrophes and business made decisions, of self-inflicted hunger, of crust splitting earthquakes and ten metre waves. And these make the once deep waters of grandeur seem even more like the deep waters of being swallowed.

And the deep waters seem even wider than they did upon the echoes of my complaints and defeatism and apathy. Deep and wide.

Finding yourself whistling hymns from childhood while walking in the wet March precipitation is something to take consolation in. That you remember them and that you still think they are brilliant.

The waters only get deeper and wider.

EDIT: I wrote this before the earthquake happened in Japan. I added the line about ten metre waves after. It all seems somewhat inappropriate now.