Navigating in the Sea of Change: Finding Stability in Life’s Turbulent Waters

It was easy to wander until lost.

They had a single tool called a sextant. With basic math, they could calculate the position and change if they had a single unmovable spot in space. So in the northern hemisphere, they turned their eyes to the Little Dipper in the sky until they found the North Star. They sighted the scope and measured and calculated. With their ever-changing position, they knew their course.

Life is our journey. We sail out into the unknown of days, months, and years. The scenery around us changes.

In my life:

I was born in 1955. Men looked at the moon and never believed in the ideas of Jules Verne that men could go there. Then, in 1957, the Russians launched a silver sphere called Sputnik that beeped at intervals. In 1969, my family sat in front of an RCA color television and watched a black-and-white Neil Armstrong plant human footprints on the moon.

In 1963, I went to school and came home that day to the reality of a president assassinated on the streets of Dallas, Texas.

I learned to type on a Smith-Corona manual typewriter. I advanced to an IBM Selectric typewriter to write my thesis for a graduate degree. Then in 1986, I got a computer, and writing never was the same.

Phones had cords until they didn’t. Now a cell phone in my pocket has made me an electronic slave.

I started the century married with one child in college and another in high school. Today, Vickie and I chase around their children with Nerf guns and Hot Wheels cars.

Hair turned from brown to gray.

In that time, I have found a single paradoxical truth:

The only thing that stays the same is that everything changes.

We never know what tomorrow or the next day, or the next year holds. Instead, it unfolds before us as a sea driven by waves and winds. How do you live? Survive? Thrive?

It is not by knowing the future. No mystic or pseudo-prophet sees farther than the end of their nose. We can all guess, but no one can be “certain.”

It is not by turning back the hands of time. No one can go backward. Regrets will remain regret. Trophies and accolades fade with time, never to regain their sheen.

As Soren Kierkegaard observed, “Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.”

Instead, it is accepting change and finding the one “pole star” to focus your life. As the old seaman, find something that gives both position and direction when you can no longer guide yourself.

Too many people make it a job that goes away in a changing economy or due to age. Some invest in their wealth only to find having much is not enough. Pleasure loses its edge.

When Solomon, who had time, money, and ability, tested life with pleasure, accumulation, and accomplishment. In the end, it was lacking. He said it was “empty and devoid of what it promised.”

Henry Lyte struggled with the same problem. In 1847, tuberculosis caused Lyte to gasp for air. The 54-year-old  was dying, and he knew it. He demanded to preach a final sermon with a few days remaining in his life and without air to move words.

In it, he cited a verse that had come to him. It became a song sung for almost 200 years by those grappling with “change and decay.” One verse of Abide With Me has stuck with me:

Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day; earth’s joys grow dim; its glories pass away; change and decay in all around I see—O Thou who changest not, abide with me!

We live with change and decay. Life does ebb away, but let our prayer be Lyte’s. In a changing world, hold to an unchanging hand.