Don't drown in your ocean!

Sometimes we help others more willingly than we help ourselves.  We offer advice freely to our friends, and we always know what to say when they have a problem.  Solving other peoples problems, at least perceptibly seems to be a lot easier for us than solving our own.  We don't have the burden of knowing every little detail about someone's life and their thought process to be able to accurately mimic their situation, so we find ourselves biased towards blue sky thinking, presenting solutions that are overly simplified.  All that changes when you find yourself in their shoes.

When you are presented with the same problems, with the added burden of knowing every little detail about our own lives, and having our complete thought process employed in the decision making process.  We get bogged down in the details and we end up talking ourselves out of the solutions we would have presented others, and we begin to appreciate why those people we offered advice to never took it when we did, because the reality is, there is always more than you know, you're never told the whole story.  It is only our story that we can know in its entirety and even then we can still find surprises, discover things we never knew about ourselves, about our past, and about our present, which can all shape our future and change our lives completely.

When you think of this fluidity and the nature of life it's quite apt to think that water is perceived to be one of the most essential components to life itself, when life shares many of its properties.  It adapts to its environment, it changes shape, it moves toward the path of least resistance, it is easy to handle in small amounts but can quickly become a flood, unstoppable, unyielding, and unforgiving.  Perhaps most of all it is incredibly hard to separate some of the things life throws at us from within it - although not impossible.

Our lives are like oceans, they may look pretty to others from the surface (although perhaps not to some) but their depth is never truly known until you dive right in.  The oceans may look peaceful and serene from above but they are filled with as many dangers as there are wonders, they can seem unending, they can hold darkness untold deep within, and it's very easy to drowned if you forget to come up for air once in a while. 

So while the depths can be so alluring, and their wonders can be something you dedicate your life to exploring, it's important to take the time to resurface, to return to your base, and appreciate the beauty of the sky, forever out of reach, yet omnipresent, whether you can see it or not wherever you find yourself you know far above you it still remains.