I've recently discovered the Roman writer and philosopher Boethius (480-524), who wrote The Consolation of Philosophy while he was imprisoned, and before being executed. I seem to share many of his ideas of finding happiness within.
This morning, while trying to organize a heap of old journals, I came across some scribblings I made during a 3-week ocean crossing with Bob aboard Topaz. (If you've ever been to sea you can probably relate to the prison metaphor, and it was an 18th-century English author and wit, Samuel Johnson, who said What is a ship but a prison, with the chance of being drowned...)
June 5, 2001
At sea, somewhere near the equator…
Salty, damp, hot
as we pound our way through
glorious but brutal humps of
water. Feeling pretty dogged, both
of us. A long journey home.
I’m still at the wheel, Bob is
below, and I start singing. I sing
every song that comes to mind, every song I know.
This cheers me immensely and
gives me a burst of euphoria
and love of life. If you can’t
be happy when times are hard or
you are physically miserable,
what good is happiness?
4 comments:
To me, the hardest part of thinking of being on board a ship like that is being unhooked from the land. I think of tom Hanks in "Castaway" when he is on that little piece of wood in the middle of the ocean, after he lost Wilson. It just gives me the shivers to think of it.
But this writing of yours is filled with happiness and optimism, and you were essentially in the same situation, but your Wilson was below. :-)
Nice find. Thanks for sharing it!
The perfect rhetorical question - think I'll try to hold on to that for future reference. Based on the past - I should be singing soon! Thank you.
WOW!You are brave.Singing at a time like that must have been hard,i admire your positive attitude.
This instantly brought to mind the following, by Henry David Thoreau: "The sail, the play of its pulse so like our own lives: so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient when least effective."
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