To Get My Feet Wet, or Not?

"To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float." -- Alan Watts

The symbolism of the water's edge helps me navigate my way through life. It gives me clear boundaries to my physical existence that mark where I can proceed and where I need to stop or get wet or get out of the boat and step on shore. These boundaries--these shores, beaches, riverbanks--exist both when I am on dry land or floating upon the water. We can transition between the medium easily enough, but not without some skills or mechanisms to allow us to survive for long. Especially if moving from dry to wet. We need protection from hypothermia, drowning and now bull sharks swimming up our freshwater rivers. Bull sharks, I kid you not. A thousand miles up the Mississippi River caught in Illinois. Saw it on "River Monsters" on the television so it must be true. Probably trying to make it to Chicago's Shedd Aquarium.

I am often envious of animals such as the waterfowl and shore birds. They can transition an additional medium when they take flight and wing through the sky. To be able to fly without a ton of steel and plastic and jet fuel would be outstanding. 

I use the transition symbolism in tackling other aspects of my life, which lately consists in what I am going to spend the remainder of my working career doing. Right now, not unlike many other people in the past, present and probably the future, I am standing on the shore and trying to decide what stroke to swim, or what boat to paddle or even if this canal needs to be crossed. At least I need to decide when to cross it and what I hope to find when I reach the other shore. 

I believe it must depend on the means I use to cross it, and like Alan Watts said, "relax and float" may beach me where I was meant to be.