Set Your Course Despite the Storms

It’s hard to believe it’s September. More than 200 days have passed since the COVID crisis began. As a society and a community, we have learned so much. We’ve learned more about this disease, both how to treat it and how to avoid it. But so many questions remain unanswered and so much remains a mystery.

As this pandemic continues and the crisis becomes amplified by out-of-control wildfires and epic storms, our lives continue to feel unsettled and uncertain. It makes it hard to plan for the future. What if I make a plan to travel and it is unsafe? What if I start looking for a new job and the economy shuts down? What if I plan to see my family for the holidays and then have to cancel -- will that be more disappointing and heart-breaking than not making the plan in the first place?

For the past six months, I’ve made few plans. I have, as my mother advises at times like this, “circled the wagons.” I’ve kept my family close. I’ve spent as little money as possible. I’ve taken little risk. I’ve set few goals -- how can you know what goal to set when you have no idea what tomorrow will bring -- and the goals I have set I’ve second-guessed or abandoned.

But I realized this morning that is no way to live, at least not for a goal crusher like me. And then this analogy came to me.

Let’s say you are setting sail on a big and epic journey -- crossing the Atlantic from England to New York. In a sailboat. Before you set sail, you precisely target your destination and carefully plot your course. Yet you know that it is more likely than not that you will face storms along the way and that those storms will pull you off course. They will force you to reset your headings and readjust your sails. Knowing those storms are likely to come, do you set out without bothering to identify your destination or set your course? Of course not. That would be insane. 

That’s how we need to live, now more than ever. We need to choose our destination and chart our course. And when the storms come, and they will, we need to be ready to batten down hatches and adjust the sails as needed. Because, as Yogi Berra put it, “if you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.”