On How Not to Steer

So easy to want to steer every moment, every direction in our life, to feel safe and secure in where we are headed.  Or even, for the more relaxed among us, who steer our life more generally, allowing for a few false starts and leeward winds - to fix our eyes unwaveringly on the distant goal, the aim, the moving target. 

Many life-strategy, goal-setting, how-to-achieve-all-you-want-in-life courses are out there, and I suppose there is a place for them.  All I know is, that when I have tried this approach for myself (sometimes for years on end) it has led to nothing but stress and strain and striving, and, even if I achieve my goal, which I sometimes do, I have somehow missed the journey itself.

Perhaps it depends on what kind of person you are.  If you are someone without much ambition, easily satisfied with the status quo, always drifting, then maybe you need a boat with an engine and a tiller.  But if you're like me, always trying to achieve, always dreaming of what's up ahead, never easily satisfied with where things are 'at' right now, then I suspect the worst thing for you is to be is a goal-setter, a striver, always reaching just beyond where you are standing right now....

If you're like me, you need to forget how to steer, and let the waves and wind take you wherever they will.

Mary Oliver puts this beautifully in her poem, If I Wanted a Boat:

I would want a boat, if I wanted a
boat, that bounded hard on the waves,
that didn't know starboard from port
and wouldn't learn, that welcomed
dolphins and headed straight for the
whales, that, when rocks were close,
would slide in for a touch or two,
that wouldn't keep land in sight and
went fast, that leaped into the spray.
What kind of life is it always to plan
and do, to promise and finish, to wish
for the near and the safe?  Yes, by the
heavens, if I wanted a boat I would want
a boat I couldn't steer.

from 'Blue Horses'