Simply Messing About in Boats

It’s been a day. A week. A month. What’s the word I’m looking for? The feeling I’m trying to summon?The antonym of a humdinger. Maybe the upside down reciprocal of a ripsnorter… Good moments and even some good days have peppered the perpetual purgatory, but it’s been a test. A looong test. And this day, today, this week were the outliers of outliers. But venting just fuels the furnace. Instead, let’s cue Ratty from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.

Believe me my young friend, there is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.

(Source: Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows)

Amen.

I’ll sidestep the frustration and pour my soul into rowing. Mindfully. Oars dipping, pulling, propelling. Reach, dip, pull, lift. Surge, glide, surge, glide. A mesmerizing wake. Symmetric eddies retreating in the distance. I count eight, nine, ten pairs of oar eddies vanishing into the distance.

I row north toward the Boquet River. I lose myself. In the rowing. In the lake. In the morning.

Stroke after stroke I meditate, mindfully muscling my way back to joy. To some sort of equilibrium.