Time and Tides

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main" said John Donne - but "I am a rock, I am an island" sang Simon and Garfunkel.  Every aphorism or proverb has its "equal and opposite" - and each contains its fragment of truth.  After all, you should always look before you leap, but he who hesitates is lost - for every proverb my parents or grandparents tossed at me, there was an opposite but apposite one waiting in the wings.

Perhaps we could compromise, and see each human as an island in a vast archipelago of such islands - our shores washed by the swirling currents of time, and gnawed at by the endless cycle of the tides of ageing, until we crumble at last and become the sand on the beaches of other islands further along the flow.  For some reason that puts me in mind of Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy.

Our stories do not progress in simple, uni-directional lines, but wax and wane like the moon and the tides and the seasons of the years, and ageing - of people or societies - would chart like a graph of tides overlaid on the trend of global warming; surging up, falling back, and surging up again, slowly trending higher as they eat away at the land.  The high tides bring in the aches and wear and tear of life, then they fall back, and for a while, all seems well again.

Sometimes the high tide runs further up the beach than any we have seen before, and sometimes it is mild, and the seas calm, and the inevitable progression seems to have stabilized.  It hasn't, of course - another king tide will be along sooner or later, or a sudden storm, or both at once. Of course, the ebb and flow brings good as well as ill, and so it should it be in our story telling.

Neither your reader nor your editor will keep turning the pages for very long if those tides and seasons of life are not in full play as line follows line.  Your story is a mirror of the lives you have seen and lived, and should be just as complex and beautiful, as fearful and consoling, as life can be - embracing its contradictions and confusion and meaning. 

I envisaged us as islands in the vast stream of life, but other writers have painted people as boats upon that stream, turned about in its eddies, cast upon its reefs or scraping on its sand-bars; sometimes fighting the current, and sometimes tossed and tumbled by the storms that sweep across it, but always moving.  Of course, that's one of the joys of writing - you can have it both ways.  Even Sherlock Holmes returned after Sir Arthur thought him thoroughly disposed of.