The emotional pull of sailing leads to all kinds of analogies and metaphors about life. The very Zen of the experience has inspired numerous posters and bumper stickers.

Here’s a unique twist in a video with Oprah Winfrey by Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor,  a professor of religion at Piedmont College in north Georgia.

“I think we’d like life to be a train… You get on, pick your destination and get off,” Rev. Taylor says. Life doesn’t work this, she explains. It’s more like a sailboat ride.

20151017_151655_resized“Every day, you have to see where the wind is and check the currents and see if there’s anybody else on the boat with you who can help out. It’s a sailboat ride — the weather changes and the currents change and the wind changes. It’s not a train ride.”

This video came to me from my daughter Wendy, in Denver. She wrote: “Right, but my Dad already taught me that.”

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