Lighthouse

I love the indifference. The ancestral heritage. The barely contained wild of the coast.

I’ve spent a bit of time on the South Coast of NSW over the last decade. From Wollongong all the way south of Eden, where the ocean meets the land, this piece of our world keeps doing what it has always done. The sea rises and washes away. Raging waves pound rock into sand. The edges of the continent wax and wane with tireless persistence.

It is beautiful.

It is brutal.

It is entirely ambivalent to human plans.

People often mistake the coast for a haven.

We venture for weekends away, for sunrise swims and fish and chips, for photos of sea mist lifting over headlands. But spend enough time on this coastline, any coastline, and you learn something else. This place is fierce. Relentless. It does not soften itself for us. The wind comes when it wants. Swell rolls in from far-off storms. Cliffs stand guard, then slowly crumble. Boats run aground. People get caught out.

That is why lighthouses exist.

Not because the sea is cruel, or because it can be tamed, but because it simply is.

Lighthouses dot the coast intermittently with their beacons. They stand where danger lurks. Built on exposed rock and battered headlands, they are placed deliberately in harm’s way.

I resonate with lighthouses. They feel everything first. Salt spray. Heat. Cold. Gales that shake windows and storms that blow sideways.

The nature of a lighthouse seems fixed. They don’t move. They don’t complain. They just stand. Silently observing, quietly doing their job, spiralling warnings into the dark.

But they’re more than what we might think.

Over the last year, I’ve visited several. And I’ve been thinking a lot about them.

I think about how they are designed to prepare us. About how they carry the weight of weather year after year. About how they don’t save sailors, they simply tell the truth about where the hazards are.

More recently, I’ve noticed how, over time, they decay, adapt, and persist. Some become museums. Some are automated, subject to solar power. Some fall into ruin. Their usefulness shifts, but their bones remain embedded in the landscape.

They remind me of people. Highly sensitive people.

The ones who feel the storm coming first. The ones who ride each crest, who observe and preserve, who absorb like high tides. Out here, on the windswept coast, sensitivity is a lighthouse. It shines even in our darkest hour.

But in our modernity, we’ve forgotten about lighthouses. Somewhere along the way, we built a culture that stopped heeding them.

We started rewarding noise instead of paying attention. Immediacy instead of care. The loudest voices are amplified, while the considered fade into the background. Sensitivity has been framed as vulnerability, as a problem to be solved rather than something to be understood.

Lighthouses are communal. They’re for all who sail the sea. Yet now, we teach people to be individually resilient. To brave the wild on our own. But lighthouses don’t work like that. They stand for the collective. They exist because someone else is out there, navigating the oceans of life.

Our culture tells us that independence is strength.

But lighthouses remind us that strength is standing watch.

The coast is where the ocean meets the shore. Where the safety of land intersects with the uncertainty of the sea. A place where we must decide what we stand for, and what we abandon to the depths.

To me, it’s obvious. The ocean is honest about its danger.

Our ignorance is not.

A lighthouse doesn’t pretend nature is benign. It doesn’t tell you what to do. It simply shows you where the rocks are.

Highly sensitive people do the same. We have little desire for control, but every intention to tell you what we know of the world.

We’re not a siren blaring, demanding you get out of the way. We are a beacon for all those on the ocean.

So in a time of immense individual loneliness, maybe we need more lighthouses.

Which brings me to the small things in life. Like children.

Lighthouses also remind me of parenting. And coaching.

Because of my eleven-year-old, I spend a lot of time on football sidelines, watching young men run drills, miss passes, and get back up after being knocked down. I watch who charges ahead and who hangs back. Who needs encouragement. Who needs boundaries. Who needs someone to simply notice them.

My job is not to control the game. It’s to help them learn to solve problems themselves. To teach them how to stand firm when the going gets tough.

To look out for them, knowing that I can’t walk every path beside them.

But I might light the way.

And in that way, I am a lighthouse.

The coast, like life, will always be wild. Storms will impact us from time to time, and people will be caught in places they didn’t expect to be.

But we can still choose what we build on the headlands of our lives.

We can choose to be, and to raise, lighthouses.

Inspired, I wrote this poem after a trip to Beecroft Peninsula. Standing on the northern edge of Jervis Bay with my two boys, I thought of Kipling’s If.

I wondered if I could be a lighthouse for my children. For the young men I coach. For highly sensitive people. For humanity.

Maybe then I will have earned my place on the long coastline of human history, helping others navigate the messy waters we all must cross.

Lighthouse

Stand, my child
like a lighthouse.
Tall, unshaken,
a beacon in the storm.

Learn to be alone,
hold against the wind.
Let waves speak their ancient lessons.

Be, my dear child,
strong and kind,
ready for what breaks or stays.

And when night comes
deep, unlit
shine.