Goals for 2007
Right now 2007 is spread out before us like a blank canvas awaiting colour. The long summer days seem to be so far away, and yet i know that all of a sudden they will be upon us and gone again in a blink of an eye. Looking down over the flow, its white capped gray waters look forbidden, wild and untamed, the winter’s harsh grip stirring their turmoil. And yet, the days are coming where the water takes on an azure so beautiful you cant help staring into it, where the sun reflects off the mirror surface, and for a few precious days the Orcadian air is truly still.
I always used to see the incoming tide as the bringer of opportunity, the coming of a good time out in the water and right now the tide has just turned, the clean fresh water of the flood is bringing us a whole new year in which to do what we love.
This year will be a strange one for me. For the first time since maybe my first year at university i have some sort of optimisim about the future, a year that i can genuinley say i am looking forward to living.
So what is making it so good?
Well, there are several things. The first is i have a career whcih is possibly the most fun you can have with your clothes on. Things are developing, or rather, have developed. More about this is a couple of weeks.
Its funny, i can remember my first dive as if it was yesterday, and that buzz, that feeling that only another diver can understand is so damned addictive it took over my world. So even though it took me a while to realise, there was only one logical path for me to take, and it involved jumping off a perfectly good boat every now and then.
Last year i was finding my feet. I had no guarantee i would enjoy what i was about to try and do, no promise i would get on with Hazel, or fit in up here in Orkney. This year i have no questions like that, no doubts.
I aim for this to be a good year for diving. My confidence is back, i have sucessfully dived for a season with no problems, completed some challenging dives and seen some fantastic things. Slowly i am getting to grips with these huge wrecks and one day i might be able to say i know a little about them. But not yet, i wouldnt be that arrogant. Maybe in 20 years time.
I aim to do a trimix course over the summer, get my trimix, nitrox and heliox blenders tickets and join the lifeboat. Also i intend to do my chamber attendant ticket so i can be of the most use in any situation.
New places are calling us, and they do call us not just me. Shetland, the nothern isles and fair isle all seem to be beckoning us onward and downward. Places 12 months ago i wouldnt have dreamed of even hoping to visit now have really become a reality.
So in a nutshell.
Enjoy life. We never know when it might end, and there is no point in spending any of it unhappy.
Accept who you are and what you are good at, or not so good at and go from there. Dont try to do something you are not designed to do.
Happiness is not the goal, it is in the chase of the goal.
Very few of us have the ability to change the entire world, but we can make small parts of it a better place.
Money is not everything.
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And that concludes todays sermon 
