You must become an ocean. There is no other choice, really, should you wish to avoid your own quite optional shipwrecks, freeing you to engage with what exists outside your modest slice of consciousness. Do not get me wrong: there is no sin in toiling in constructed pain—we creatures do it for reasons sound as they are unknown. But there are a few junctures where the smooth road is just as valuable as the rough one. Existing beyond this pain is one such choice.
We get swept by shit things. Like when my partner and I had sex in the evening and by midnight she was sucking another man’s face in his own bed. Or after high school when I slept with a married woman twice my age, sloughing off my culpability only for guilt to return and capsize me. This is real pain, caused and felt. But then comes the constructed pain. I’ve lost nights to rage and weeks to sadness and shame. I’ve forced others worse fates. Any shit thing can become a shipwreck. It can swell to be the only reference point. Your crucifix. At its worst it can leave you powerless to heal beyond the pain or change into a better self (because, says the shipwreck, the shit thing is yourself).
What if these horrors made us indeed, as the shipwrecks dare? If we were only as full as our pain and our sins. Even worse if we were only our triumphs, summits so puny once robbed of their mountains.
You must become an ocean. Become vaster than your failings and your treasures. Become vaster than your joys and secret sorrows. Become vaster—not to distance, but to hold, to relish the wholeness that comes from perspective alone. For to be swept away by any single fragment of existence is not to become One, but to give all away for one. It is to sacrifice yourself for another—person, belief, event—and thus sacrifice both for nothing. This is the young lover’s mistake.
Some days I don’t believe this at all. Some days my heart screams that I am only as good as the worst thing I’ve ever done. These days will keep coming, and I will keep getting swept, holding on to hope that somehow, somewhere, I will wash ashore again.
Like any lasting change, this is a meditation. Choose to become an ocean. Choose it again.