Of Life and Whales

When aimlessly staring unveils the answer you have been looking... and waiting... for.

Just as we said it they appeared. A trio dancing in perfect unison, directly in our line of sight. Had they heard us? Impossible. Felt our urge? Cosmically, perhaps.  Oblivious completely and merely following their own whims? Absolutely. Therein the frustratingly addicting and liberating magic of the sea. 

Seagulls skating over the waves, ‘paketes’ dancing in their sandy foam. Us, we, the rest of us - we sit on land hoping to see a crown jewel, to witness the majesty from below - the silking of a dolphin across the water or breach of a whale arising from the azure below.

Like a great thought slowly percolating in the background of your mind waiting to be released, or the next step in the pivot in your career you painful await to appear, spotting a school of dolphins, or better yet, the grand dame of a whale, come to those who bravely, and most often, seemingly aimlessly, wait.  Wait without purpose or agenda, wait without even waiting, but rather wait through believing. Believing that they exist, that “it” exists, and will present itself when they, and you, are good and ready. 

Their presence cannot be forced or willed. We had just said, after all, that there had been no sightings in weeks before their majesties frolicked in the wave break before us.  What if we had turned our backs on the horizon, or picked up our phones in dismay?  We would have missed this ephemeral dance. Which should make us realize - finding “it” is not about watching or hunting or observing - it is about believing.  It is about trusting.  It is about patiently being.  

Every now and then the distant corner of the eye catches a sudden patch of movement or foam atop the dark blue.  This, the possibility, murmurs of hope. Then, if lucky, a spume of water from a blow - a sigh of life and sign of faith, evidence that it is down there, somewhere, existing and alive, that thing you want or need so badly.  The teaser occasionally makes its way into the scene,  a tail or fin glistening with the reflection of the sun guiding us all from above. And then, when they are ready, and most often when we are not - the leap, the aha!, the breach. The moment they come to our light, the instant we capture what we have been searching for.

We must learn to look by not looking, by knowing that it will surface when it wants to,  not when we do, remembering that they are there not to remind us of how small we are as insists cliched nomenclature about the creatures of the sea, but rather to provide perspective on how big, how possible, how breathtaking, the next moments can, and will, be.  If we wait.  If we believe.  If we trust. 

There is an art to staring at nothing, especially when you accept that the nothing is actually the everything.  Whales’ breaching the bounding line of the horizon as the inclusion of the new, dolphins’ frolicks as the flutter of the beloved.  The ocean is full of movement, but it is by being still in the presence of the constant motion, by learning to exist between the waves, that the magic surfaces 

The frustration of waiting, of looking, of searching. The agony of thinking you are doing everything to make it appear - that job, that  answer, that next step, this next piece - without realizing the only thing you really can do is believe in the horizon, and wait, without losing hope, for it is when you are least looking that the best ensemble appears. 

The waiting, after all,  is the hardest part. And how beautiful that wait can actually be. 

In the words of Tom Petty:

“Don't it feel like heaven right now?

Don't it feel like somethin' from a dream?....

The waiting is the hardest part

Every day you see one more card

You take it on faith, you take it to the heart

The waiting is the hardest part.”