After all the holidays there’s an emotional let-down. The money is a little tighter due to special expenses. There’s physical and mental exhaustion. We are depleted in almost every way. We are experiencing “low tide.”
The human mind seem hard-wired to notice patterns, to have creative interpretations of the environment around us, to perceive our world as metaphor.
Living near the water, tides are a fact of nature, especially low tide when the water recedes from the shore, exposing wide areas of beach. This outward flow, this low ebb, deposits debris and living creatures on the sand. Items which, only minutes before had been floating in the water, now lay helpless in the air.
We see the effect of tides on other structures as well, such as the accumulation of rubble against the boulders of a breakwater, or on the pylons supporting a dock, where barnacles attached to the pylons are exposed during a low tide. Barnacles are a metaphor all their own; witness the name, “Barnacle Bill,” who is seen as an old sailor, encrusted with years of hard work and fast living.
If you’d like to investigate the phenomenon of tides further, I recommend these three sources:
The rise and fall of emotions approaching and following a holiday—or any of life’s highpoints–find perfect analogs in the rising and falling of tides.
What I particularly like about this metaphor is that, at low tide, one usually discovers the most interesting things exposed on the beach (in your heart, in your life, etc.). That’s true for any “low” time, isn’t it? If it weren’t for the low tides, we’d never see these jewels, we’d never find beautiful seashells, never find new directions, never learn new lessons. They would always be obscured by the high tides of water and life. The detritus exposed in our lives (on the beach) during low tides–sad though they may make us temporarily–really are treasures eventually, aren’t they.
I love to walk the water’s edge at low tide.
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