Ship;

Life is: from birth, we ship;

If there’s one word that comes close to summing up all that has been on my mind lately, the way I have been learning, the experiences I’ve been having, it’s this word: ship. But that’s not where it ends. As you see, from the title of this entry, there is a semicolon as well. Ship;

Ship; but wait, there is more to follow. What that more is, however, I have no way of knowing.

From a creative standpoint, and I think Steve Jobs stated it best: “Real artists ship”. No matter our level of talent, no matter the medium that we work in, we as makers and visionaries tend to honor our journey with a project at its delivery, unveiling, publishing, uploading, or exposure to the public, and to the world. Ship is the point where it leaves our hands to become. It’s the point where our work departs from its berth, though how far it reaches lies dependent on who encounters it next. Who will consume its contents, and how will it taste? Who will gaze upon its image, and how will it appear? Who will interact with it like a captain, or like the artist before, and find connections to be made that feel sound enough to comfort or move that person, and perhaps serve them at that particular moment in their life?

Can the same be said for the way that we ourselves are shipped throughout or lives?

There is an intriguing contrast in the creation of works of art, against the stages and happenings of life. Art, more often than not, is iteration after iteration, starting anew by tossing out a crumpled piece of paper, tracing over starting lines to make them sharper and more finite, constant practice, ceaseless doing until something is finally made. This tactic applied to living, however, can very quickly become chaos and insanity. Doing becomes destructive. The more it is attempted, the more that is destroyed. And getting a grip cannot be as easily achieved as pulling out a new blank canvas. Art has stages, many beginnings and many endings. Life, in its wholeness, is quite linear, coming from one start, and ending in one place.

Art cannot come from inaction. Though in life, stillness is very much an element of conception. For in existence, we are the vessels set out to sea; we ourselves are the ships. Out of silence and tranquility, the cosmos is formed, and contracts, and expands. From the quiet intimacy of two people in love, together as one fluid entity in the dark, life is made. And from there we sail through our life milestones on a constant tide of reaching, obtaining, giving, and letting go.

Beyond our origin is where we begin to assimilate to the prominence of works of art. By way of our identities formed and molded in equal parts by our parents, our siblings, the roots we stretched into the ground, by the people in touch with us from infancy to today, by the environments we habituated within, we all become our very own version of a magnum opus. However, that prime of our existence remains fluid as we keep sailing. Our peaks reached at 12 are not the same as the ones we reach at 18. Nor is the first peak we ever ascend our last. And those peaks we come across at 50 are even more significant in their own right, in perspective on the passage and feats of our lives to that point.

We are released to navigate forward to an unknown fate that is at the mercy of every influential notion we come in touch with. But still we ship, and still we sail, towards the very best of times, and through the very worst of times. While opposing, these bests and worsts contribute equally to our identities in the constant turbulence of what we gain and what we are stripped of. And even in our passing on, while supremely permanent and agonizing to those who live on, our ship does not end. Rather, it permeates into the carrying force of others as they continue forward, and contributes vastly to the headings they take, and through that we are immortalized. As if we are all within one perpetual circle of life.

Life is: from birth, we ship;