Geoffrey Chaucer is considered to be one of the great English poets. He is the author of The Canterbury Tales, but I don’t think I’ve read much of his work. I sometimes think that I avoided reading classical literature in high school. I did read the mandatory plays of Shakespeare and I read a few classical novels, but my interests didn’t turn to literature, and especially to poetry until I became a bit older and a bit more mature. Although I am an avid reader and I spend time with poetry on a regular basis at this stage of my life, I have somehow missed some of the classics. What I know about Chaucer is a single quote, written some seven hundred years ago: “Time and tide wait for no man.” I’ve been thinking about that quote, without any particular context recently simply because living next to the ocean has made me aware of the tides.

Having lived most of my life far from the ocean, I had a rudimentary understanding of the ebb and flow of ocean waters from having traveled. I remember being surprised by fishing boats left in the mud during low tide when visiting the Brittany coast on a trip to Europe. I was really impressed with the huge tidal variations when we visited the Bay of Fundy in Canada, where the tides change by more than 50 feet every six hours or so. I vaguely knew that there was a relationship between the tides and the phases of the moon, but before moving to the coast and developing a pattern of walking along the beach nearly every day, I didn’t really understand the tides.

Of course, if I had paused to think about it, I suppose I would have understood that it isn’t just the moon that has an effect on the tides. On this planet, when we speak of gravity, we need to be aware of the much larger sun, which exerts gravitational pull on all of the planets of our solar system. For those of us walking along the beach the result is that when the sun, moon, and earth line up at full moon and at the new moon the tides are higher. Conversely, when the sun and moon are at right angles in relationship with the earth, as is the case when the moon is at quarters, the tides will be lower. Those monthly variations are known as spring tides, when the tide is higher and neap tides when it is lower.

Then to make the effect even more pronounced, the distance between the moon and the earth varies because the orbit of the moon is elliptical. When the moon is closest to the earth and aligned with the sun at full or new moon we get king tides, which are the greatest tidal variation of the year, usually in the fall around here.

The tides can seem a bit dramatic here because our bay is shallow. When the tides are very low there can be a significant amount of mud between what we consider to be our beach and the water. Those tides happen when the moon is at quarters and also at its greatest distance from the earth.

Right now, the tides are relatively high and the water level in the bay is generally on a range right at the bay where we walk. For example, all day today, the water level in the bay will be higher than average, with the highest tide over 10 feet and the daytime low tide only a couple of feet lower. The lowest tide will be tonight at nearly midnight when it will sink to two feet below, making the tidal variation between our highest and lowest tides over 12 feet.

And so far, I’ve written more than half of my usual essay with information that people who live next to the ocean all of their lives know intuitively and don’t have to think about as much as I do. And it all started by my admission that there is a lot of classical literature that I have not read. I suppose I could have made the same point by reflecting on rock music. After all, when I was in my twenties the Rolling Stones sang, “Time waits for no one, and it won’t wait for me,” which is pretty much a Chaucer quote, but I didn’t see the connection back then.

What I am slowly learning as I grow into my seventies is not so much of a sense that the passing of time or the rising and falling of the tides are forces that are bigger than my life, which they certainly are, but rather that there is a rhythm to the universe of which I am a part.

One doesn’t have to live next to an ocean to experience the movement of water as a metaphor for the passage of time. Although I haven’t read Chaucer, I’m not totally culturally deprived. I read Thoreau’s “Walden” as a teen. Although the book contains reflections about living next to a pond, it is his comparison of the passage of time to a moving stream that continues to capture me. He describes time as “but a stream I go a-fishing in.” Growing up next to a blue ribbon trout stream and not being very good at fishing has given me a sense of connection to that metaphor. Actually, I’m not bad at fishing, I’m just not very good at catching. I have know for most of my life that the experience of fishing is not limited to catching. I enjoy the benefits of casting a fly and quietly reflecting as it drifts down the stream even when nothing rises to the hook.

Whether allowing my mind to drift with the waters of a stream or tune my daily walks to the rising and falling of the tide, I find solace in the movement of water and the passage of time. Thoreau says of the stream: “Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.” My time may be growing shorter as I grow older, but the flow of human history continues. I write thousands of words, but sometimes just a few say more than the multitudes. And so I will continue to read the words of the poets and allow them to seep into my memory. Time and tide may wait for no one, but we all can dance to their rhythm and take time for a bit of fishing.