The Beauty of Sailing: Embracing the Slow Journey - A Blog Swap With Shades of Art

Photo Credit to Johnny Killroy on Unsplash

Today, I'm thrilled to be having a blog swap with my friend, Autumn Grace!

Autumn is a lover of writing and art, and on her blog, Shades of Art, she shares her love of the arts and their creators with her readers through thoughtful and inspiring posts.

You can hop over to her blog to read my post on young cello prodigy Jacqueline du Pré, and her tragic life story.

In the meantime, continue reading below to see an important message Autumn has to share, a message for those who feel not good enough, those who feel left behind.

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Feeling left behind is hard. 

 And feeling left behind is normal. 

But, as a friend and I have been talking about lately, just because something is normal, doesn’t mean it’s okay. 

Feeling left behind is something that I have been struggling with a lot in the past couple years, and it is something that, until recently, I have felt like I am fruitlessly fighting. For a while, whenever I sat down and seriously thought about it, I felt like there was someone always ahead of me. (There always will be, I now realize!) There were goals that people younger than I had reached. (Again! Because people have some strengths others don’t, this will always be true!) I felt like I could never do anything that everybody else could. 

However, after talking things through with a friend and my mom, I started to feel a little better about my worries—I shouldn’t be comparing myself to other people, but to Jesus. Just a week or two later, when I was attending the Young Writer’s Workshop Retreat in early August, Brett Harris, author of Do Hard Things, got up to speak. And wouldn’t you know? His topic was on the very thing that I had been struggling with. His seminar hit home when he told the students “the path you want to walk, and the person you want to become don’t match.”

After that, I had a pretty new way of looking at things. When I started to get discouraged, I thought back to that truth. Yet, as none of us are, I wasn’t “reborn” that day. I still struggled with the feeling, though it was less powerful than it had been once upon a time.      

Then, the other day, I happened to see something  else that opened my eyes even more. I was staring out the large glass windows of our living room that looked down on the large lake below our mountain. On the lake, I saw a beautiful white sailboat. Because I have always been a fan of sailboats, I got excited by the sight right away and took a picture of it. After that, I just watched it. It glided very slowly forward, the wind rippling in its sails. Then it turned and began a tack, moving slowly in the direction it wanted to go. 

All of a sudden, five or six motorboats rounded an island and zoomed into view. White water flew and, in a moment or two, the boats were roaring past the sailboat. Like a thunderclap, I realized that I resonated with the sailboat. I felt left behind and slow. In a minute, I was feeling bad for myself again. 

But then I realized that the motorboats were gone, and the sailboat was still plugging along down the lake. “The people in the sailboat can probably see a lot more of the shorelines that they’re passing than the people in the motorboats could,” I suddenly thought. 

And several things came together for me. 

First of all, the motorboats had gone by so fast, the people in them had missed the majority of the beauty that filled the shorelines. Did I really want to be a motorboat? And how much had I already missed by trying to be one? Then, I wondered what I was trying to accomplish by being a motorboat. What was I shooting towards anyway? A future that would finally be fulfilling enough for me to relax? No, I realized. Because I had already gotten a small taste of this type of endless motion towards the future, I knew that it was never satisfying when it became the present—not as long as I was looking to a new future, anyway. 

The second thing I realized was that the sailboat had made a much longer impression on me than the motorboats had; the sailboat was still there, for another twenty minutes at least, for me to enjoy. The glory and speed of the motorboats had been impressive, sure, but it was gone already. The sailboat remained for far longer, and thus remained on my mind longer. 

I wondered if it was the same with people. Do those who go past in a flurry of activity last on people’s minds longer because they were impressive? Or do they fade quickly because they are always moving forward, never spending time in the moment? I realize that the answer seems pretty obvious, but the truth of it is much harder to implicate in our lives.

In the end, I learned two things from this short lesson. Feeling left behind (and therefore trying to move ahead at an unhealthy rate) is bad for you and for others. You feel bad when you can’t meet those goals or are unprepared mentally even if you do meet them. But you also lose time with the people you love most, and possibly lose some of their good opinion of you. 

The two different paths became vivid that day. The path in which I can learn far more in every aspect (life, education, relationships etc.) by slowing down. Or the one in which today isn’t a big deal because I already thought about it yesterday, and because tomorrow is what’s now important.

The path that never lets you say “hello” to today. 

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If you found this post helpful, I would love to see your thoughts. Comment below! Also, if you enjoyed this post and would like to see more of Autumn's works, be sure to check out her blog and subscribe. :)