Drifting

He'd been trying to get somewhere his whole life.

This is not a criticism — it is just a description. He had the quality, common among the driven, of always being slightly ahead of himself. The present was the approach to the future. The achievement was the platform for the next one. The arrival was never quite arrival because arrival meant you had to begin again.

He noticed this in himself at sixty-one, which is not when he'd have chosen to notice it but is when it arrived.

He was sitting on a boat in open water. His son had taken him sailing. They were becalmed — the wind had dropped, the sails were slack, the boat was drifting without purpose.

He'd started to feel the restlessness. The sense that they should be doing something, going somewhere, working the situation.

Then he looked at the water.

The water was doing what water does. Moving without urgency, without destination, in the directions available to it. The boat was doing what the water did. His son was leaning on the rail looking at the horizon, entirely at ease.

He tried to find the ease.

He looked at the water.

He had been trying to get somewhere his whole life.

What if the drifting was the somewhere?

The water went on doing what it did. The boat moved slightly. The horizon was the horizon.

After a while the wind picked up and they sailed on and he spent the afternoon watching the water and not thinking about where they were going.

It was the best afternoon he'd had in years.

He had arrived, he understood on the way home, at exactly where he needed to be.

He had been there the whole time.