The Mooring of Our Life
“The more the outside world spins out of
control,
The more your interior world must assume
total control.”
Caroline Myss
Canada
Day, and it’s raining; so we don’t know if we’re going to venture out to take
in the Canada Day celebrations. We usually go to Orillia, the town that Stephen
Leacock made famous with his Sunset
Sketches of a Little Town. They celebrate Canada Day by the waterfront with
various food booths and activities, and if he’s up to it Gospel Elvis may show
up to sing a tune or two with endearing verisimilitude. We may still attend;
but as we were having our morning coffee the conversation found its way to the
interior life, how people are so focused on their exterior life that they have very
little time to focus on their interior life, and I said to Penny, “I think I
should do a spiritual musing on this.”
But I
needed an entry point, as I always do whenever an idea for a spiritual musing
comes to me; so we talked about this and that—friends and relatives, which was
normal, and the new book that I was reading, Caroline Myss’s book Entering the Castle, Finding the Inner Path
to God and Your Soul’s Purpose; and as we talked about the interior life the
word “mooring” just popped into my mind, and with a gentle nod from my Muse I’m
going to explore the concept of “mooring” in today’s spiritual musing…
To
moor something is to anchor it, like mooring a boat. In his iconic poem Invictus, which inspired Nelsen Mandela
for 27 years in prison on Robben Island, the poet William Ernest Henley sees
our life as a ship at the mercy of the capricious forces of the sea of life,
which he refers to as “the fell clutch of circumstance,” but despite what
tempestuous forces come soul’s way, Henley says, “I am the master of my fate:
/I am the captain of my soul.”
Henley’s
poem Invictus anchored Nelson
Mandela’s soul. He wrote the poem on a scrap of paper and had it on his prison
wall and drew strength from it every day; in this way he “moored” his soul
despite “the horror of the shades” and “menace of the years.” “I am
fundamentally an optimist,” Mandela wrote in his memoirs. “I would not and
could not give myself up to despair. That way lays defeat and death.” And when
he was released from prison he became president of South Africa; and the Robben
Island prison became a monument to his indomitable courage, endurance, and
optimism.
Ever
since the explosion of social media I’ve been in a quandary, because for the
life of me I fail to see where we are headed; it all seems to be coming in so
fast and furious that it feels like a phantasmagoric blur of human activity
that has no inherent purpose, and life feels like a rudderless ship blown
hither and thither by the capricious god Poseidon.
I
know better, though. I know that life is not a tale told by an idiot full of
sound and fury signifying nothing; but one would never guess this from social
media. It all seems to be up in the air, a catch-as-catch-can game of beat the
clock before the monster tsunami comes rolling in and destroys us all, and
people are too afraid to stop and moor their soul to safe harbor and grab as
much life as they can before their ship goes down; even the hosts of my
favorite CBC talk shows Q and The Current are speaking at double the
speed to squeeze in all the information they can into their limited slot of
time. It’s exhausting!
Has
society lost its mooring? Is this why there are so many social disruptions and
soul-wrenching insurrections across the world—not to mention all the calamitous
weather anomalies that have uprooted so many lives? What’s going on?
Change,
that’s what’s going on. The winds of change are blowing throughout the world,
especially in the Middle East, and the world is going through a transition that
has thrown us all into confusion. That’s why it feels like the world is going
mad. But it’s not. It just seems that way. But the change that I see coming may
not be so easy to explain…
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