Currents and Constants
Managing life, I learned, is a lot like learning to navigate water.
Some days you’re drifting easy, like a leaf on a slow-moving river. Other days, you’re white-knuckled, fighting a riptide you didn’t even see coming. Somewhere along the way, maybe in the middle of grief’s undertow I realized that if I was going to survive, I had to stop flailing and start studying the currents themselves.
Water gave me the perfect analogies.
Drag. Weight. Gravity. Buoyancy.
Each word became a tool, not just for survival, but for mastery. Life drags at you with responsibilities, with grief, with the silent heaviness of just being. Gravity pulls. Weight accumulates. But buoyancy, buoyancy is the quiet miracle that lets you rise above it all without denying its existence.
When I thought about who embodied that kind of buoyancy best, my mind went to one ancient teacher above all others: Jesus Christ.
But hear me clearly this wasn’t the casual, ad hoc kind of faith that gets pulled out like a lucky coin when things go bad.
No, this had to be a constant.
Something enduring. Renewable.
Not dependent on proving a physical form or clinging to ancient debates about history or flesh.
I wasn’t looking for something temporal. I was looking for something that could ride the currents with me.
The message, not the artifacts, was what saved me. The compassion, the forgiveness, the radical acceptance of brokenness paired with the audacity to demand transformation anyway. These were the forces that acted like invisible life vests, keeping my spirit afloat when everything else around me sank.
It was a renewable energy source.
A steady, quiet fire that never seemed to go out no matter how strong the current roared.
In this, it was like mathematics again.
Mathematics measures change and time , and yet, itself remains unchanged. Constants rearrange under new operations, but they don’t vanish. They don’t lose their truth just because the symbols shuffle or the formulas get dressed up in new algorithms.
When I was a child in school, I watched parents and teachers argue endlessly over the best methods of teaching math : flashcards, new math, old math, manipulatives, rote memory drills.
But no matter what battles they fought, the constants were constants.
2 + 2 was still 4.
Pi still circled the circumference of existence.
The underlying truths didn’t waver; only our methods of reaching them shifted.
It’s the same with spiritual buoyancy.
The messages that lift you, sustain you, and allow you to travel the rough waters, they don’t depend on fashion or proof or who’s shouting the loudest.
They just are.
Timeless. Unyielding.
Anchors you can tether yourself to without fear of being dragged under.
Learning to manage the currents of life wasn’t about fighting harder.
It was about learning to float, to steer, to trust the invisible mathematics of the soul, and to remember that no matter how dark the waters got, I was carried by something that didn’t change, even when everything else did.
