In

There are certain risks associated with skimming the surface of anything, of not spending the time to investigate depths.  Among these risks are those associated on every level, real and metaphor, as they relate to becoming caught up in the undertow, that capricious tide running contrary to the shoreline.

Ancient seafarers understood the sense of safety implicit in keeping the coastline in view.  Today, we use as metaphor the journey beyond the point where we can see land to signify risk as an ante into the pot, the winning hand being discovery.

You don’t go beyond or below, you run the risk of seeing little of interest, of missing some experience or vision that has a life-changing potential.  Not going beyond is another way of saying “playing it safe,” the “it” being any experience or venture out of the ordinary.

Your experience with such things is a mixed bag, reinforcing your belief and understanding of the strategy where the greater regret invariably comes from what you have not gone beyond your previous limits to experience.  There are to be sure some memories of botched ventures, but even in retrospect you can say you were never looking for perfection.

The experiences of going beyond recognizable landmarks are among your favorites.  Somewhere in the area below your umbilical, the tingle of excitement and a sharp, almost astringent pleasure begin to radiate, of a sudden finding a place in your mouth, then traversing your torso in tiny, electric flickers, almost as though you were being bathed by a determined cat.

You’ve had the experiencing after a night on the carouse of difficulty coordinating the gestures necessary to get your house key into the door lock.  Sometimes your attempts to get deeper into a project have let you with that key in the lock feeling, other times you’d have settled for that instead of the frustration you’d felt at not getting close enough to a project, sensing something was missing but neither being able to locate it nor identify it with any sense of being accurate.

There were times when friends, family, associates asked you when you were going to do something serious, which was bad enough on one level, but you made it worse through your sense of the frustration that came out of the woodwork like hungry termites.

Sometimes it seems to you that things have taken forever, both the things you’ve actively sought and the things you’d hoped would occur to you merely because you sought them.

Doesn’t work that way.

The universe is both passive and active; with little regard much less patience for you to issue a hall pass.  You can in fact work your butt off in quest of a goal and not earn it, only to find the answer or reward delivered to you as though a gift from the representations of Greek gods who were lowered onto the stage in some sort of basket.

Chances are some bewildered FedEx deliveryman might mistakenly bring you something you’d sought for long, difficult years.  But the chances are just as equal that he will not or that, indeed, all your work and focus will not accomplish your goal, either.

That does not stop you.

Nor should it.

You could argue that the universe might cough it up, as it were, dumping it in your lap.  Trouble with that is, you might not trust it.

For “it” to have any chance at all of working, you need to be inside “it,” deep in communication with it, close enough even to see enough of its bells and whistles for you to make a temporary sketch.  Even then, you’ll no doubt have missed an important detail.  You’ll have to keep going back until you get it.