When you get to recognize that life itself is a juxtaposition of contradiction, a whirlpool of the opposing forces of cold fact and versions of interpretation.
It's daffodils in breezes. It's 8 wheeled juggernauts facing off. Shoots of cress on a conscious planet.
Paradigms of religion and ethics, love and vocation, exertion and television, a discordant mess of intrigue, growth, excitement and ill-thought out ideas.
When you scrawl your personal manual, the bit of your brain that you can permawrite a few lessons into, you realize that you can dip into it and set your sail to steer a clear seamonster-free course.
Of course until you realise that, every wind will be a shock. Every cloud a brand new problem each and everytime. A hurricane will be unfathomable. And when you catch a following tide you may attribute it to supernatural inventions of your deluded mind. Unless you are good at pattern recognition, then you can start to fake it.
But when you find and realise the locus of inscription, you can set your sail.
You can steer beyond the contradictions of science and belief, between longevity and fidelity, between hope and probability.
And you can climb your mast to your crow's nest of understanding and your extended analogy of weirdness.
And look out. Look out over the past and future, of tides to come and shores reinterpreted by selective memory and jaded experience.
But you can see.
You can sail with skill.
You can ride the waves. Hell, you might even choose to steer into a few choppy waters for a bit of fun when you know you can handle it.
You might have an affair.
You might buy a motorbike.
You might close your eyes to the inevitable shores ahead that that course leads to. And that you must eventually negotiate. Maybe you'll sail around a bit in a few circles before you do.
You might run a red light.
You might make some lousy decisions.
You might decide to get a bit stupid.
Or you might not.
