The Ship Metaphor: Identity, Goals and Dreams in The Time of COVID-19

Dear Readers,

I hope you and your loved ones are all safe and well. How are you getting on in this time of such great change?

I have been keeping busy in my solitary quarantine. I am working remotely for my non-profit day job, doing readings, and working on finishing up a short film I wrote and directed. I have so many things I want to write about over here - especially about dream symbolism, which I know has become increasingly important during this crisis, which has many of us dreaming more intensely than before! However, a conversation I recently had online with a friend of mine made me feel like I had a more pressing issue to share.

The pandemic we are currently facing has meant that many of us have seen our lives disrupted as never before. Our social connections have been pared down to a minimum. Our hopes, plans and dreams for our future have suddenly been cast into uncertainty, canceled, postponed, or reframed in unfamiliar terrain. 


Each one of us is having a somewhat different experience of the same thing. Probably whatever wasn’t working in your previous life, personally, politically, financially, emotionally - has now become magnified under pressure, ripe for transformation.


As my spirit guide Natalie so eloquently put it: “When you are in quarantine, your mind easily mistakes the unfamiliar, unsettling sense of restriction for a lack of hope in the future. This is an illusion.” 


My friend recently expressed on a post how completely disheartened she felt with her current situation under the current restrictions in NYC, with no end in sight. Right before the pandemic, she had accepted her dream job at an illustrious cultural institution. Now, she said, it was likely that job would be gone by the time the crisis was over. She felt like all her hopes had been dashed. Isolated, her savings dwindling, everything that brought her joy, that made life worth living, seemed to be fading away. She said that without her dreams, she felt like her sense of identity was beginning to disappear. She no longer knew who she was.

My heart hurt for her. So many of us are facing loss, crisis, transformation, and a tearing down of our old lives. I really wanted to find the right words to comfort her. And then, I was reminded of something my guides taught me sometime ago. As with so many of their teachings, this pandemic has brought into stark relief just how practically applicable their advice can be.

The lesson they taught me through clairaudient dictation was about thinking of goal-setting and our life trajectories as our soul being a captain sailing her ship. 


The captain gets to choose the destination and chart the course of the ship. It is also up to her to take good care of the ship, to keep its sails full.  She has a crew to help her. (Our guides, they tell me, are our crew! Isn’t that a lovely thought?) However, the captain doesn’t control the weather the ship sails on. Sometimes the weather will be warm and pleasant, with a strong wind in the desired direction, and sometimes things can get a bit rocky. The captain can keep her feelers out, and learn to see a storm coming, but it’s not always up to her whether the ship can stay the course during the storm. Once the storm passes, however, she can get back on her journey to her destination, if she so chooses.


The important thing is to not confuse a patch of stormy weather with a deliberate change in destination. Sometimes you just have to weather the storm and continue on. But ultimately, whether or not you decide to permanently embark on a different journey is entirely up to you and your free will. 


A storm is just that: weather that will pass. It is a circumstance. It cannot take your hopes and dreams from you if you do not surrender them to it. “The charting of the course is up to you. Plan ahead for the weather, but do not let it dictate your destination,” say my guides.

Your goals are your destinations. (Destination and destiny share the same root!) You are the one who gets to pick them! And the love, joy, and inspiration you pour into everything you do is what keeps your sails full. 


And here’s the thing: We are all sharing in this crazy experience together, across the globe. When has humanity last had such an opportunity to really think about our shared trajectory and destination - where our collective ship is headed? 


Some people have countered the platitude of saying “we are all in the same boat” regarding this pandemic, with “We are all in the same storm, but in different boats.” Well, yes! Not only is this true in the sense that some of us are better sociologically equipped to weather the fallout of this crisis than others, but in a spiritual sense, we are all souls helming the ships of our hopes and dreams on turbulent waters, dreaming of our own destinations.


And guess what? When this crisis is over (and it will be over one day, sooner than many of us fear), all of us will still have those same hopes and dreams. We will still have our talents, and our preferences, and our capacity to love. We will still be our Selves, for our true Selves are eternal. All of us will be raring to go, wanting to pour all of our energy into rebuilding, reimagining, and transforming the world. 




We will get through this! 


So, for anyone out there who is beginning to lose hope, I beg of you: put a little faith in our ability to collectively come together, a little wiser for wear, and create something new, something better than what came before.

Love,

Emily and The Team (The Crew!)