Ship of Fate

I can find it so easy to place much weight upon one idea.

When an idea exists only in my head as a hypothetical, I can easily behold it through rose colored spectacles. I can imagine the beauty of an ideal situation and allow myself to become excited by what might come. The difficulties are there, certainly, but they seem somehow smaller when viewed from a distance.

Do I not anticipate these challenges? I think I do.

I do not think that I miscalculate. I think that I make a proper calculation, only one weighted by optimism. I see something that I know is good, and I allow myself to be excited for it without being distracted by the frightening parts.

I am an optimist.

There is something good in this. A man must possess some hope if he is ever to begin a difficult journey. If he looked only upon the hardships before him, he might never take the first step.

Yet there comes a moment when the hypothetical becomes real.

Then I begin to see more clearly.

The difficulties have not necessarily grown greater. I have merely drawn near enough to see them for what they are. What seemed small from a distance can become rather substantial when it must actually be borne. What I once imagined as an inconvenience becomes something I must live with day after day.

Perhaps this is part of the strange education of life.

We imagine the open sea while we are confined within the ice. We long to be free of the present difficulty and imagine that once we have passed beyond it, there will be nothing more to ask for. Then the sea opens before us, the wind fills the sails, and we discover that freedom itself brings its own labours.

Yet perhaps this is no reason for regret.

The good we imagined may still be good when we finally possess it. It simply becomes more real. It acquires weight. It asks something of us.

Perhaps I ought to learn to receive good things in this way. To hope for them freely, to rejoice when they come, and then to accept the difficulties which accompany them without allowing those difficulties to obscure the gift.

The imagined good is beautiful because it has not yet been burdened by reality.

The real good is beautiful because we have to suffer for it.


Many a time, when blocked up in the ice, with everything dismal and discouraging about us, had we said, if we were only fairly round, and standing north on the other side, we should ask for no more; and now we had it all, with a clear sea and as much wind as a sailor could pray for. If the best part of a voyage is the last part, surely we had all now that we could wish. Every one was in the highest spirits, and the ship seemed as glad as any of us at getting out of her confinement. (Dana, Two Years Before the Mast)

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