Once upon a time it made sense to me to talk about friendships for ever, life commitments and very long terms projects. Yet time came at our resolutions as the sea hits the shoreline. I remember the drama of the Caribbean shores of my adolescence, rocky cliffs handsomely facing the onslaught of the green sea, huge boulders breaking away from the land and disappearing in the always churning water, incessant in her battering, tireless in her attack. And then I do remember those long sandy beaches of my childhood in the south american Atlantic, also continuously wiped by the long waves and always changing, always the same.
Now and then one does see the rare spire of rock, already detached from the mainland, and still defiant at the waves that surrounds her. Indeed, we have keep some friends from long ago, those persons that have resisted our stupidities and capriccios, the ones that have seen beyond our pettyness and our passing anger and have been defiant in their love, almost as if betting for a version of ourselves that we ourselves didn’t believe in.
It is also true that in this delta where I live now in my adulthood, when one goes to the sea shore, it is possible to see the changes that we can not see. In few years sandbars become islands, lush with plants and birds and people taking a sunbath. There are no rocky shores in The Netherlands, but one humongous expanse of sand, eternally reshaped by the Rhin meeting the North Sea, unchanged to the eye and always different. So I look thirty years back and I do see myself involved in one or another attempt at doing green politics, just as today and most likely as tomorrow. But I also remember my arguments, the shallowness of what I then believe to have great depth, or the anger, the red hot anger that burned my convictions and gave me a certainty that fails me today. I believe that the anger has been replaced by a sense of urgency, that after all is not that different, but is not the same.
Here and there I have written about the place where I do most of my scuba diving, a lake not that far away from Utrecht. It is not such a big lake, and there are few entry points for us divers. I might have made, in the last decade, some 800 dives there. If the water would vacate the place, I believe I’d be able to walk all over the exposed bottom with my eyes closed, knowing precisely where I am. And yet there has not been a dive where I have not seen something new, and unknown. Perhaps a new reflexion of the sun, or a fish kind I was unaware it existed in The Netherlands.
Once upon a time I thought that this, this uniqueness of each dive, was the unique thing of going underwater, what was made diving a whole other activity than anything else. I believe I know better now. I feel that my days are just like those dives, days that start at the same place and have a recognizable shape that will repeat tomorrow.
But I also know that our days are battered and caressed, reshaped that is, by the ongoing waves of time.