Hovering Through
June 24, 2025
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Tired of being your own Providence?
After so many decades of striving and seeking, it’s time to apply a lesson I learned from snorkeling: just hover and let the wonders of the world come to me.
I like to read the journal
of Thomas Merton each day, because his mind was a heated cauldron of ideas, insight, and inspiration.
Last Monday, waking up saddened by so many stressful happenings outside my control, I came across this passage from Merton’s journal of June 24, 1947: “I am tired of being my own Providence.”
He was describing his impatience with himself for being caught up and distracted by the minutiae of life.
I connected this monk’s discomforts with advice I received years ago from my swimming guru, Melon Dash, who has been a major influence in my life. Melon is the originator of an innovative self-discovery course in swimming and has taught it to more than 4,000 adult students, and counting.
She taught me to forsake the kind of snorkeling that has you dashing about from reef to reef and rock to rock in pursuit of the next aquatic allurement, underwater camera in hand.
She talked about “hovering.”
It’s a matter of finding a suitable spot where the mystical creatures of the sea are likely to congregate – and just floating there, as motionless as you can manage.
Melon says:
"What makes snorkeling most magical – hovering – is the same thing that makes other mindful activities magical: being fully there. In snorkeling, if I stop not just my body but myself, and let moments unfold, out come the creatures, and out pops what's already there that I had missed."
Add to Melon’s counsel the example of my late friend and sailing mentor, Bill McKay, who once described a November day in his tranquil life:
“A beautiful day that will have me oystering, putting up storm windows, bringing in a quarter-cord of firewood, sailing, and then off to dinner at a friend’s house.”
The dead giveaway, I think, is when my kids started teasing me about my compulsion for creating spreadsheets for everything – from my daily task list to my weight, blood pressure, and diet monitoring.
For Father’s Day this month, one of my daughters gave me a mug emblazoned with the words, “I have a spreadsheet for that!”
So, I’m going to try.
I’m going to try to slow down. To move through my day with the same mindfulness I did as a snorkeler – concentrating on the rhythmic coursing of my breath. To cease charging from place to place in search of the perfect something. To stop measuring the time that might be left for me to finish all the projects I’ve listed on the master spreadsheet of my life.
And I’ll try to finally face the fact, as Merton did, that: “The more I go on, the more I realize I don’t know where I am going.”
I, too, am tired of being my own Providence.