By Betsy Gonwa, 
We are in different boats, but we are all in the same storm. This is the message of a Facebook post that someone shared with me. A couple weeks ago, my boat had been sailing along just fine, and then, when I got a call from one of my children, home sick with coronavirus symptoms, suddenly it wasn’t. I felt like I had changed boats. But in reality, my boat had not changed. As a parent of an essential worker, I had been in the same boat all along. I had just pretended that I was on a big steady ship, safely resting in the hold, and that, unlike others, neither I nor any member of my family would need a lifeboat. After all, we were taking precautions.
In that moment, my perspective changed. Instead of looking farther out into the future, I was looking instead at getting through one day and one night, holding onto hope. I needed to reset my sails.
I had successfully navigated days of being present in the house with my husband teaching online, which meant not being in the kitchen, or at least doing only quiet things in the kitchen, when he was teaching. I had been meeting with directees over the phone and on SKYPE, attending yoga class and book club and a variety of meetings via Zoom, talking with my walking partners over the phone while we walked in our respective neighborhoods, limiting my grocery shopping trips and in general just staying home.
But my sails had not been set for navigating through this part of the storm. All of a sudden, my life that had seemed to be moving along, slowed to a crawl. In fact, perhaps slower than a crawl. I stopped moving forward at all. I was, I realized, like my eight-and-a-half-month-old granddaughter, Mary, who has been learning to crawl.
“She crawls!” read the text message that accompanied the video of her crawling. Forward. Until then, she had only been scooting backward, and had inevitably gotten stuck and in need of rescue. After weeks of backing herself into walls and various pieces of furniture, especially legs – of the sofa, or the dining room table, or the dining room chairs – she was crawling from one room into another.
Backing myself into a corner is what heppened to me, I realized, when I looked at the date at the top of the blog post I had begun writing. I had not noticed that I was moving backward, but it was evident that I had certainly stopped moving forward. To use a sailor’s term, I was in the doldrums. An adjustment in my sails was necessary. But what kind of adjustment was the question.
I am not acquainted with many sailors. When I hear the term “adjustment,” it is usually from someone who has visited the chiropractor or from my yoga teacher describing what he will do to help me or another student be properly aligned in a particular yoga pose. These kinds of adjustments are made in order to open blockages in our bodies in order to allow the flow of life energy through us. Some of us understand this flow to be the Energy of the Divine moving in and through us. We understand it to be not only physical, but also emotional and spiritual, as we are body-mind-spirit beings.
There is a poem on the Spiritual Direction page of my website, The Set of the Sails by Ella Wheeler Wilcox. I was introduced to this poem many years ago, and seized on it when asked to create a metaphor for spiritual direction. I liken the role of a spiritual director to an experienced deckhand, helping us to adjust the sails on our boats in order to allow us to move forward in the direction we want to be going in our lives when the Spirit fills our sails. These adjustments to our metaphorical sails can take many forms.
The adjustment to my sails meant reaching out to friends for prayer and support, noticing the birds outside my window, going on nourishing walks in the woods, and getting more rest. A week later, I felt a weight lifted off my shoulders when the COVID test results came back negative. Even though I know it could be a false negative, the weight still lifted. And now I am adjusting the set of my sails again.
What adjustments are you making to the set of your sails?
