Manic Monday: Ship

"One ship drives east and another drives west,
With the selfsame winds that blow.
'Tis the set of the sails, and not the gales
Which tells us the way to go.

"Like the winds of the sea are the ways of fate,
As we voyage along through life:
'Tis the set of the soul which decides its goal,
And not the calm or the strife."

-- Ella Wheeler Wilcox (Poet, 1850-1919)

I found this poem whilst trawling through results on old ship sayings and I fell in love with it at once.
When I dropped out of university due to a whole host of things I felt miserable and lost. Then mums health took a turn for the worse and she needed my help at bit more round the house. After a while my mum began to worry that I was neglecting my own future and so to placate her I went to college and signed up for a short counselling course.
Its been over a year now and I am firmly on the path to becoming a counsellor, from that first lesson I was hooked. If things had been different I would be a research ecologist now, counting bugs in a field.
The ship may have sailed on my chance to be an ecologist but I cant help but think that fate has led me this way.