Let it Be

9x12 oil

Keeping my head on straight during a particularly frustrating painting or even in the dark, emotional throes of an isolating pandemic, is a skill I learned long ago on my step-father’s deep-sea charter fishing boat.

I was fourteen at the time, working as a deck hand and feeling luckier than a dog in a pick-up truck. The problem was, I was not at all big enough, strong enough, or smart enough for the job. My step-father, John, who to this day lives as a legend of his time, was accommodating my mother by allowing me the honor of tying and untying the boat at the pier, mopping down the decks, straightening up the galley and washing the salt off the windows. Though I puffed around as if I were some kind of a big deal, I was not much more than a ball boy in a major league baseball game.

Still, John gave me that chance, and I thank him for it. I learned a lot from him. And truly, he is a legend among his people. He has lived a life of his own choosing, and one can hardly do much better than that.

Deep-sea fishing for me was a thrilling, dangerous, exotic and cross-eyed boring way of life. I never knew what kind of day we were going to have out there on the water. But I loved getting up early and heading out into the harbor to unmoor the boat and bring it in to the pier. I then worked my way through my chores and welcomed aboard the people who had chartered the boat for the day. My big moment came when we set out, when I untied the boat and leaped aboard as if I’d been doing that since I was knee-high to a bilge pump.

In the clear, glassy morning we’d troll out to the marlin grounds, the ocean so blue you’d think it was a mile deep, which it was. Then on the luckiest of days, lulled half asleep by the drone of the engines, I’d bolt awake to the loud snap and bang of a lure being hit. I’d lurch up, looking for my bearings as one of the big rods danced in its shiny chrome rod holder, bowing out over the back end of the boat as line screamed off the reel and vanished into the sea. Then, rising from the depths, an angry blue behemoth would leap clear out of the ocean and tail-dance a swath of frothy white water over the surface of the sea, and I could only gasp and shout and stagger back as one of the great rushes of my entire life threatened right then and there to overwhelm me, to come for me, to take me down. Ho!

On other days you got nothing but a long, boring boat ride, eight hours of waiting as the rich cobalt ocean turned into a choppy silver glare in the late afternoon, and all you could think about was heading back to the harbor for stable ground and something cold to drink.

Excitement and boredom. Ebb and flow. Crest and trough. Blue and silver. The infinite rhythm of life.

Now, in times of the ebb, the boredom, the silver glare I get frustrated … with my unremarkable painting skills, with my pandemic isolation, with my suddenly limited life. I feel down, lazy, unmotivated, lethargic. I look at my marginal work and want to give up.

But I don’t, because I know there will be a crest to every trough, a calm harbor to every eye-frying choppy silver sea. I will never be stuck in one or the other. Everything is changing, always changing. It’s the inherent nature of life. Though it’s not always easy to pull off, I’ve learned not to run away from the unpleasant, or to superficially tease something unpleasant into something more to my liking. Today’s marginal effort could be tomorrow’s masterful improvement all on its own.

Our life journey is an evolution. We change and change and change. There is no stopping it, like it or not. For me, the key to a peaceful life is simple: try as hard as I can to see the bigger picture, and let disruption be. No amount of worry, lethargy, lack of inspiration, or manipulation is going to change any of it.

The way I see it, we are all evolving toward some unknown something out there, something way beyond our comprehension. And I have to say, when I really think about it, the thought of that something is as thrilling to me as the sight of an eight-hundred pound blue marlin dancing its way across the sea.

Let it be. Everything is perfect. Even my mediocrity.