I just read a FB entry by a friend. It was a photo of a little girl dancing with abandon in the rain with this Vivian Green quote embedded in a artistic script: “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, its about learning to dance in the rain.”
This happens to echo several favorite quotes of mine with the theme of “just get on with things!” and don’t wait for the perfect opportunity because that opportunity may never come. I’ve written about this before here in this post. I do believe we must seize the day and every opportunity to progress towards our goals and purpose. No more waiting for the dance party and no more hanging out under a shelter waiting for the sunshine to enjoy–if we want to dance, just like a little girl who always has her dancing shoes on, we should dance NOW rather than sit around and say “someday, I’ll dance.”
Is there fallout from the act of seizing the day? Especially those stormy, messy days when we dance with abandon in the rain? At first it is not so obvious. We live and learn and grow and are rewarded for taking the risks. For David and I, sometimes things are all sunshine and light–and sometimes events are like slogging through the unexpected rains–the process of rebuilding, sailing, and continuing to restore Mahdee bit-by-bit often feels just like that carefree little girl dancing in the rain. Fresh, clean, happy and invigorating. It’s all good, right? Sometimes.
Along the way, I’ve begun to notice the muddy dance in the rain just doesn’t sparkle with the same magic that spinning wildly in the sunshine and collapsing on a clean grassy lawn does. My analog is breaking down, but I am beginning to wonder “what now?” No one told me that dancing in the rain requires so much more forethought than I’ve given it.
Rather than having my fun stomping in the rain in knee-high galoshes and a slicker, I seem to have chosen to wear my patent slippers and satin sheath, ruining them for the dance floor. Returning to Mahdee, the practical matters of getting on with things mean that right now we’re often being creative with the raw materials right at hand for a particular project or doing something with the boat a bit differently than we might otherwise do. Today, this literally means David is making and installing a wood cleat for the gaff vang and wood blocks to mount the running backstay winches on rather than me finding the “just perfect” period-appropriate cleat and just-so-perfect winch-mounts for Mahdee. Yes, wood is always period-appropriate and the proper bronze mounting brackets would have been hard, if not impossible, to come by. Maybe I would have never found just the right things and determined just the right placement for them. You see, I haven’t found them yet–and time is ticking away. Each little choice–from Sunbrella instead of canvas, fleece instead of mohair, or paint instead of varnish–takes us down a path that I wonder “Is this compromising choice OK for classsic schooner Mahdee?” And now choosing to take advantage of an opportunity and sail north in just a few days–taking us into rain, fog, and cold rather than sunny warm tropics, I wonder, “Is this choice OK for me?”
That’s because, unlike the little girl I once was with boundless energy and a lifetime of resources to gather and use, I’m finally beginning to think my world is actually finite. With that, I begin to wonder if I should buy some galoshes to wear and stomp my feet and splash in full acknowledgement of the storm and with a totally different kind of abandon rather than pirouette and pretend to be totally oblivious to the rain.
