Reliant Book - Final words

"Begin with the end in mind." ~ Stephen Covey

Sabbaticals exist, the way mermaids exist.  

In perilous depths, a mariner gazed into the deep and saw a tail too small to be a whale's.  Murky depths prevented full view, thus imaginations filled in the blanks.  Seafaring men, far from home, filled in the blanks with voluptuousness.  Perhaps mermaids' legend began far from the known, on a heaving deck at the edge of the unknown.

From 1910 - 1970, six million Black Americans stood on the edge of the unknown.  Southern morays and culture were abandoned for the murky depths of northern factories.  In perilous depths, citizens looked past the lethality of the work and saw opportunity.  Work was the hope; sabbatical was mythical during the Great Migration.  The closest most came to a sabbatical was the Sabbath Day.

On the Sabbath, mortals gazed into immortality.  Through a glass dimly, mornings and afternoons were spent filling in the blanks.  Texts were lifted in houses of worship but honest cantors, deacons and muezzins would admit to filling in the blanks.  Ancient texts, like merciless seas, require our participation.  To truly hazard unplumbed depths, we must insert ourselves.

Into seas, mariners inserted themselves and into factories, migrants inserted themselves.  Whether into rolling waves or blast furnaces, death becomes a companion.  Gold, duty, dependents or indenture push people to the edge.  Who looks into suffocation's throat voluntarily?  Ale, like religion, breasts and opium, help us kill the pain.  Laborers and sailors often cling to one, sometimes several, stubbornly.

A clinging generation whispered of sabbaticals.

Professionals took sabbaticals.  They had lake houses, boats and options for climatic differentiation.  When houses were too hot, we heard adults whisper of places professionals fled: coasts, cottages, Catalinas.  Summer homes were, to us, as mermaids were to indebted matelots.  We suspected comfortable options existed but had to fill in blanks voluptuously.

Mermaids are real if my employer is dangling the idea of a sabbatical, and my wife is conversing of sabbatical plans.  My influencers sang:

I am on the battlefield for my Lord

I am on the battlefield for my Lord

And I promised Him that I

Would serve Him until I die

I am on the battlefield for my Lord. 

There is no sabbath for a sailor whispering such.  Rather work continued until work discontinued.  Retirement was a euphemism for, "We broke him or her and need more young backs."   I write of sabbath the way sailors told of mermaids.  

They told what they knew in whispered tones and so do I.