Point of Confluence

Point of Confluence

As some of you may remember reading about in previous blogs, my wife and I have been pursuing a hobby the last few years called geocaching. The official definition of geocaching is: “Geocaching is a real-world outdoor treasure hunting game. Players try to locate hidden containers, called geocaches, using GPS-enabled devices and then share their experiences online.” Each of the six-hundred-and-some geocaches that we've found have had a name along with a latitude and a longitude to enable us to find it using our GPS devices. Last year we found one in a small town about 15 miles north of where we live. It's title was “A Point of Confluence”. It was a rather mundane and unremarkable geocache in the middle of a field. It's “claim to fame”, I suppose, was that it was located at a particular point on the earth's surface defined as North Latitude 41 degrees 00 minutes 00 seconds, West Longitude 82 degrees 00 minutes 00 seconds. If you look at a globe of the earth you can see those lines of latitude and longitude drawn on it. The latitudes are the ones that go east and west and don't touch. The longitudes are the ones that go north and south and touch at the poles.

As I stood at the location of that particular geocache I visualized in my mind the two heavy black lines on a map of the Earth's surface converging at that spot. The North 41 degree latitude line swinging in from the east and rolling out to the west eventually crossing the wide Pacific Ocean, Japan, North Korea, China, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal before crossing the Atlantic and again meeting at my point of confluence. I also visualized the West 82 degree of longitude line running north from my location across Canada and the center of Hudson Bay, on through the icy wastes of the Arctic to the North Pole where it became the East 92 degree line diving south through Mongolia, China, Thailand and countless miles of the Pacific before meeting at the South Pole in Antarctica and racing again north on the West 82 degree line nipping the west coast of South America, Panama, Cuba, Florida and back up to my cache site. As I stood on that erstwhile “magical” spot I could feel the connection to those far-flung and exotic places by the magical lines that connected us.

Of course I could have performed the same mental exercise using any latitude and longitude, but this spot was on an important one! At least to the mapmakers and cartographers. It was interesting looking at my GPS and seeing all those zeros. All those minutes and seconds added up that all came out even at zero.

I guess there wasn't any really practical use to know that the field behind a certain McDonald's restaurant was a Major point of confluence. Perhaps only as an odd coincidence in our hobby.

But it got me to thinking... and eventually led to this blog.

I guess, if you wanted to, you could compare your life to a line of latitude or longitude and the important events that occur in that life could be defined as points of confluence. Some would be minor ones with odd numbers of minutes and seconds. New cars. Vacations. Holidays. Promotions. Others could be majors where the numbers have lots of zeros. Births of children. Deaths of loved ones. Job changes. Relocations. A lot of these points could be imagined as visible as they come sweeping in at you as you move along your line. Others would seem to sneak up on you and arrive at unexpected times.

I've got what could be construed as a major point of confluence bearing down on me at the moment, one that's been threatening to arrive for some time and now is upon me and a number of people who are “riding the line” with me. It's a point that holds promise and concern, happiness and sorrow, uncertainty and resolution. But most of all it holds change, and change is always the wild card of life.

To be more precise and to quit speaking in metaphors, my immediate supervisor is retiring at the end of the month.

I've been in my present job for almost a decade now and my currant supervisor hired me. I was trained primarily by him and I perform my duties as he wishes them to be performed. I've grown fond of him as we are akin in age and akin in a lot of our life experiences. He's been a mentor to me and a confidant, a boss and a friend in equal measure. And over the years he's placed his stamp on the department that he heads. We all know how things work, we all know what he expects and we've all grown accustomed to the “way things are done” under his leadership.

The department is as much defined by him as it is echoed by us.

And now that's going to change.

Now we're going to be, as they might say, marching to a different drummer.

Our present supervisor's replacement is well known to all of us. He's liked, he's eminently capable and we all expect that he'll be able to handle his new duties capably. His skill set is a bit different than that of our present leader, but not so much so as to cause great concern.

But it will be different around here. There will be changes. There will be differences both obvious and covert.

And to top things off, to put another layer of icing on the cake, our new supervisor's boss has just left for greener pastures and we have a new supervisor in that position also.

I expect a bit of a roller coaster ride for the next few months.

And the points of confluence on our jolly ol' line of latitude (or longitude) just keep rollin' on by.