Tell-Tale Signs

"The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.” ~ William Arthur Ward


Flying to Decatur a few weeks ago I started thinking about life; dreams that go unfilled and hopes that some of the goals we have remaining can be attained, and the hope that life will continue to unfold new opportunities creating new dreams and goals.

But life isn’t as simple as a Southwest flight. A good flight plan, clear directions from air traffic controllers and highways in the sky to navigate make air travel fairly routine to get to your destination. Clearly our lives are more complicated. Attaining our goals, our preset destination, is much more complex and certainly more eventful. As the saying goes, ‘life happens’.

The challenge for each of us is to stay the course as much as possible. Mapping the plan out, charting the course is clearly important, and goal setting and planning for life’s success is so critical. Knowing where you want to go and getting there can often be at odds with the direction life’s wind blows. Without the plan, and a resolve to stay on course, our lives are often full of chaos, stress, excuses and blame.

As I thought about that, where I am at today, how I got here and where I am going, got me thinking about a sailboat and how the captain of the boat takes advantage of the changing direction of the wind changing the setting of the sails to get the boat to his or her final destination. I asked myself “What are those little pieces of fabric on the sails and mast that help the captain determine how to set the sails to maximize the energy of the wind?”

A Google search led me to the answer; tell-tales. Those small pieces of fabric which help the pilot maximize the setting of the sails are called tell-tales. TELL-TALE SIGNS in life! Are we perceptive to the changing of the wind in our lives to know when it’s time to change the setting of the sails to stay on course and help us get to our destination quicker? If we missed those signs in our lives, knowing we can’t get to our original destination, do we give up, or chart a new course, knowing now to be more receptive to those tell-tale signs.

Like the captain of the ship, we need to pay attention to the changes in the wind. Most of us know what we want but we don’t chart our course and therefore are susceptible to ending up anywhere. When the wind changes direction we try to ‘go with the flow’ but it only hurts us and after time we look back and wonder how we got so far off course then we realize the signs we missed.

Every day is a new day on the journey. We need to have the next leg of it charted, we need to push off from the docks, set our sails, and look at the tell-tale signs as we continue to reset the course as the wind of life will take us a little off it. Life’s path never is a straight line from here to there. Just try and stay close to it.