Is your ocean blue?

Picture this.

You wake up. It’s early, not stupid O’clock early, but it’s the morning, with ambient sounds that make you conscious to not make a sound in case you miss the sound of nature's gift.

The gift is the ocean. My thoughts as I write pause. Am I being judgemental of my audience? Am I not considering the prejudiced connotations my scene-setting might evoke?

So, let me put myself on the side of the reader. I have an advantage because I know what I would like you to see and hear, but, as I write, I hear my inner voice, which challenges my intended actions to tap on a keyboard, which is to lead the reader to think a certain way, look at certain things, feel specific emotions, but that’s unfair.

I’m privileged in the fact I have every sensory faculty working. I can see, hear, smell, and touch. I am able-bodied, and I’m searching my memory for relevant data I can successfully convert to words the reader will be able to capture, resonate and understand, but it’s not that simple.

So, with the continuation of this story, I am surrendering my subjectivity in leading in the hope you, the reader, can use the faculty best owned to you so that this article can serve you the best it can.

If you cannot see because you have impaired vision (and using Braile, or a digital equivalent), please revert to auditory or smell sensory abilities with a ton of imagination.

We’re back in the place where the sun is shining and glistens on the ripples of the water to give you a strange sparkle combined with a heat streak on your face as you look out ahead and feel the invisible air gently brushing your body, giving you a sense of transcendence.

Can you see/feel/smell/sense the blue ocean?

Would you want to wake up to that every morning?

Allow me to give you a different scenario.

You’re in the same place. You’ve woken up begrudgingly at the same time as the previous scenario. The sun is still there, but your enjoyment of the view/smell/feel is getting disturbed by the untimely development of clouds hiding the sun. The morning is bright, but there is an overcast threat, the wind biting, and the ripples are a tad more aggressive. The ocean is still blue, but all is not well. There’s floating debris. The more you stay there and analyse in your sensory way the messier the ocean gets. If you were a morning sea dip kind of person, your day has just been spoilt. You can smell an off-putting aroma, and it’s the stench from the rotting corpses of sea life that the toxicity has poisoned in the polluted ocean.

This is not a story about climate change. This is a story about discovery. Self-discovery.

Can you think of a time in your life when you felt the first scenario?
If your thought took you back to your childhood, fast forward to recent times. Do you wake up and look at your day as the blue ocean or the toxic ocean?

The blue ocean represents a day of opportunity. It’s gorgeous, vibrant, vast, inviting, and an excitement stimulates your senses which transfers to affirmative, positive and appropriate action.
You go to sleep the night before for the reason to charge into the day ahead. If your day is the blue ocean, you, my friend, are living a life of purpose and meaning.

It doesn't mean if you wake up to the toxic ocean that you are not living a life of purpose or meaning; it means your challenges are surmounting the fact of confusion. The confusion is the noise. The noise of the world. Your imagination transfers the noise to stuff. The stuff is other people's judgements, opinions and their offloading which happens to get in your way when all you want to do is swim!

The messy ocean represents your clouded judgement, a bias, conscious, confirmation or otherwise, and the requirement for clarity, but there's too much sensory overwhelm to continue a life well-lived.

What is a life well lived? The life you’re living now! Why? Because there is nothing in your way except you!

The blue ocean is an analogy for your life now.
The messy, clustered, polluted, and toxic ocean is an analogy of your life in the imagination.

Over 2000 years ago, a wise man once said “we suffer more in our imagination than we do in reality”. That man was Seneca, an ancient philosopher, born in Spain and educated in Rome, son of a writer.
Seneca identifies as a Stoic. Stoicism has had a resurgence of late and a type of renaissance through the Global Pandemic that hit our world in March 2020.

Through Stoicism, you will see your life through a different lens. The lens is an awakened lens.
Go live a life of meaning, Live immediately, Live deliberately.

Awaken to the fact YOU ARE the blue ocean.