I spent the summer after I dropped out of college living in the Indiana Dunes. I was house sitting for an anthropology professor who's course I had never taken. A friend of mine from the Steelworkers union put us together, and he was happy to have someone he felt he could trust stay in his home for three months while he wrote a book in Poland.
I remember one evening, in the middle of June. My friends and I had gotten in the habit of gathering driftwood and building a fire on the beach (a short two block walk from the house) and talking about the things that seem big and important when you are twenty, usually over a bottle of something or another. That evening I got to thinking about tides. I hadn't been to the ocean yet, and therefore hadn't seen the tide. But as we sat there under the stars, I looked up at the full moon and started wondering about the lunar effect of gravity on the lake. It occurred to me that if there could be a tide in the ocean, there must be a tide in other bodies of liquid as well. Glasses of water, brain fluid, bathtubs, even the bottle of wine we were almost finished with.
Out of this revelation my young adult mind had conjured, I began to think about the effects of gravity on other forces in my universe (small now, but smaller then). Could the cycle of the universe, the cycle of our solar system, our earth, our lives correspond to the natural cycles in motion in this impossibly huge gyroscope that God has set in motion impact our tiny lives as well? That summer I started paying attention to the ebb and flow of my life, and the lives around me. People come and people go. Relationships, friendships, loves and passions all ebb and flow. There are times when my life is so full, so balanced that I simply get up in the morning and move, drifting through my life without thought or concern. Other times it's hard: I get up in the morning and fight my way through a difficult slog of a day, looking forward to bed, knowing that I have only another tough day to wake up to.
I was thinking about that moment the other night. In the grand scheme of things, my life had been spinning along quite well. The tide was in. As of late, however, I've felt the tide flowing out. Another cycle of my life, (and perhaps the lives of those around me) flowing out into the sea of human experience. As I stepped off the bus and into the rainy fall Chicago night, I stopped for a moment, and looked up into the soupy sky. Is the tide going out again? I suppose only time will tell.
Image via AerocK
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