little gifts from gift from the sea

my mom and sisters and i all read the book gift from the sea before we got together a few weeks ago, and we had excellent discussions about its concepts in our gathering near the ocean. i can’t stop thinking about the things i learned from that book.

today is a day long looked forward to and worked for by my coworkers and i. we will celebrate innosight institute and its five years of identifying disruptive solutions to society’s most challenging problems in our fifth anniversary gala. today amidst all the craziness i want to remember this idea about deliberate, present living:

“the joy of such a pattern is not only the joy of creation or the joy of participation, it is also the joy of living in the moment. lightness of touch and living in the moment art intertwined. one cannot dance well unless one is in time with the music, not leaning back to the last step or pressing forward into the next one, but posed directly on the present step as it comes. perfect poise on the beat is what gives good dancing its sense of ease, of timelessness, of the eternal. it is what blake was speaking of when he wrote:
he who bends himself a joy
doth the winged life destroy,
but he who kisses the joy as it flies
lives in eternity’s sunrise.”

and as i think about the future and all its uncertainty, i want to remember this gift of a lesson from the sea:

“the “veritable life” of our emotions and our relationships also is intermittent. when you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. it is an impossibility. it is even a lie to pretend to. and yet this is exactly what most of us demand. we have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. we leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. we are afraid it will never return. we insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity, when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity – in freedom…one must accept the security of the winged life, of ebb and flow, of intermittency.”