Ocean Currents Can Keep You Stuck

Go ahead, call me a woman in midlife if you have to, but I have been telling a lot of stories lately of “my life long ago”.

In fact there is a chapter about that very tendency in “How Not to Become a Little Old Lady”. Each of my kids has good naturedly given me that book on separate occasions...hmmmm) oh ya being distracted from the point of the story is in there too.
Ok where was I...

Here’s one of the more recent stories I’ve told.

I was on an Outward Bound course based on Hurricane Island. Hurricane Island sits in the magnificent Penobscot Bay off the coast of Maine. It was summer of 1976 and I was in a group of men and women that spent all 23 days cruising the coast of Maine. We were in a 26 foot long pulling boat (aka row boat). There were 2 instructors and 10 students.

One day we were told to get ourselves from “here to there”.
Aye Aye Captain! All hands on oars! By this point in our course we considered ourselves skilled master yachtsmen. We had been on the water about....5 days already!

All 10 of us students started pulling (aka rowing). And we pulled and we pulled and we pulled and we pulled. But we didn’t move an inch because we were going against an ocean current that was strong and determined as we were.

We stayed in one spot for literally hours and but did not realize it because our newly acquired navigational skills where not that finely tuned. We did notice that the same landmark was in the same place for a long time. There was no discernible progress; none; nada; zilch. Frustration, fatigue and fury were on an even keel with “how mean can two instructors be?”

Have you ever felt like you were hopelessly stuck in a fierce current of life that, no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t get out of it?

There are a few choices here: You can continue to struggle forever, but remember, “Resistance is futile”. You can continue to struggle until you give up. You can continue to struggle until you pass out. You can cry yourself to sleep.

Believe it or not, there are a few more choices here. The key to change in this situation is to stop fighting the current. You can drop off your charted course and sit it out in an eddy. You can wait for the tide to change so you are riding the current in the direction it is going. You are then effortlessly in the proverbial flow. What a concept. You can acknowledge your place in the universal scheme of things and co-operate, collaborate, enter into relationship with the powerful ocean and navigate the current with information, intelligence, patience and trust.

How? First decide to be different. Then get the support you need to change. Hiring a life coach is one great way to do that. A life coach will help you focus your dreams, goals and desires and design a way to get "from here to there". Begin your exploreation of life coaching at wwww.CircleofLifeCoach.com