The Red Chair of Courage

Anyone who takes the time put a chair at the end of a concrete pier under construction can't be all bad. Staring out at the ocean is an art, the art of emptyness, in a good sense of the word. One is left open to big thoughts about life and self and all kinds of other meanings-fraught notions. No one looks out at the waves and thinks of bonds and stocks and jobs and pillories, or schemes an aweful thing. The edge-of-pier folk seek not this or that specific thought, but rather solace, a restorative moment, a little peace, and what ever else comes naturally to the living waters-calmed physic of endlessly ailing modern man. Here at pier's edge we may learn as much what we are not, as what we are. It takes guts, of a kind, to let the mind wander out over the ocean far enough to look back with some perspective, at the person sitting in the red chair of courage.