Rambling thoughts

I guess this isn't so much of a story as it is a bit of a rambling idea...

I feel oddly compelled to write, and yet every time I try I find I have nothing to write about. Who would want to read what I have to say? I have done nothing interesting in my life. I have lived through no great hardships, nor have I learned any great insight which I could share with you. It is in those frustrating moments of try and fail where I feel my life thus far has been almost wasted. Sure, my life may seem exciting on the surface - I'm in the Navy and I have seen many different countries and sailed many different seas. Look much beyond that, though, and the picture seems rather bleak. My life is much more like the sea - calm and steady. Though a few storms occasionally roll through, when the rain ceases to fall and the wind dies down, the sea remains as it was; seemingly untouched to the naked eye.

Much like the oceans shape the coastlines, and rivers dig canyons into the earth, my calm and steady sea of existence is ever-shaping who I am. Ever-changing. Ever-evolving. Yet seemingly always the same. No matter how much of the sandy beach or rocky coastline is eaten away by the the ocean's pounding ebb and flow, it is still the same ocean and it is still the same earth. They are separate, and constant. They are one, and different. As the ocean's tide drives in, a large deep breath of the earth is inhaled with it. The shore has become a part of the sea. And as the tide slips back out again, the earth remains dampened in it's wake. The sea is now part of the shore. We play this give and take every day, often times without even realizing it. Every life I come into contact with is somehow forever changed, if only minutely, and I am likewise changed. There are pieces of me in everyone I know now or have known in the past, and pieces of them are eternally flowing within me. I have been changed, yet I appear to remain the same. I am still the same me I have always been, and yet I am undeniably different at the same time.
 
The only constant is change itself. It is an absolute conundrum and the most pure truth. Nothing in the world is black and white. It's all shades of gray, because everything flows together like the oceans, and rivers flow together. Like lives flow together. Like life itself flows together and is never ending. When one life ceases to exist, another will have begun. Ever-changing. Ever-constant.