When we roll and toss our way through a troubled sleep, it is so often about precisely that: how to meet the next wave crashing against our ordered, well-controlled lives. The question of why it is that nothing we do seems to enable us to get any kind of constant control over our lives rankles within us. We struggle against having to learn once more how to surf the features of the next phase of life and survive. We grasp for false calm at every turning of the day and call ourselves damned or cursed or burdened or beaten without it. And yet, if we were forced to live in the peace that is listlessness, we would die from the tedium of it all. We seduce ourselves into thinking that we like the lack of challenge. We forget how dull becalmed can be.

The strange thing is that we seldom stop to consider the value of the waves themselves.

The waves of life break into the center of our languor to remind us that the quality of our lives is not simply given to us, it needs to be earned. Life doesn’t come cut to size; it requires shaping. Life is the way we deal with it as well as the way we look at it. The waves of life—those subtle but clear changes in old routines, or the established ambience, or social pattern, or daily practices—are designed to call our attention to the fact that underneath the apparently still waters around us, something is beginning to rumble and churn. Something is changing now. It is our time to adjust, to cope, to grow again beyond our old stale selves. We cannot simply float through life forever.

Instead, every wave brings with it a new set of circumstances to consider. In our agitated sleep we know that we do not have the luxury of running away. We cannot, we know, simply ignore what’s going on around us as if it were all someone else’s problem. It will take its toll on us, we know. The shift in the neighborhood; the local election; the bank failures around the country; the growing violence in the streets; the derision of people unlike us; the suppression of women. It’s not a matter of clinging to the past now. In fact, there is no past now; there is only a present in the process of convulsion. Of spiritual tsunami.

—from Between the Dark and the Daylight
by Joan Chittister