LIFE BOAT

 

So there I was bobbing and rolling on a crystal clear Aegean sea ,the chugg of the engine and the lapping of the foam created by the boat 's swirl the only sounds accompanying my reverie. At sea with six of the most important people in my life, at sea but not adrift with my first mate as my anchor. I care about my crewmates and they care about me. This is important; to be around those who you cherish and who in turn cherish you. A tight ship, if you will.

The vast expanse of ocean that surrounded me was a stark counterpoint to the reduced world I had existed in a mere four weeks ago: that world was a world of four walls, my ability to climb out of bed was diminished my capacity to step outside the environs of my front door compromised by anxious thoughts that, like a runaway express train, threatened to permanently derail my day to day wishes for normality.

As defining moments go my pause for reflection off the coast of Rhodes defined how far I had come both in a physical sense of time and space and in terms of recovery. Yes recovery is a process that can be taken for granted because it consists of milestones, most of which are in fact small steps toward a goal: mine being the abstraction that I choose to call normality.

A boat on the sea quite possibly has a deeper psychological meaning and that's something I need to define another day, but that moment on the seven seas will be one that I will return to when the dark shadow that is discouragement visits again, and like a mutinous Blaggard I shall hurl him off the starboard bow into the rock strewn depths and raise cutlasses with my shipmates.