JOBSON’S COVE, Bermuda—The waves break, one after another, over my head and shoulders as I stroke and kick my way toward a distant outcropping of rocks on the shore.

I’m swimming parallel to the shore, maybe a couple of hundred yards out from land. The water is cold, but not unbearably so—bracing but not chilling. The sea is restless, the chops coming fast and powerful, while the sun moves in and out of the clouds.

I have needed this.

Before I got into the water, several residents of this lovely island community told me the people who live here rarely step into the ocean until Bermuda Day, the last Friday in May, when shorts become the proper attire for business and natives plunge back into the sea.

I could not wait that long.

Swimming in an ocean—any ocean—always has been a restorative act. It clarifies my thinking. The rush and surge of the water remind me of certain unvarying fundamental truths—of the things I can do and, surrounded by something ageless and immense in scope, of the things that are beyond my power to affect.

A particularly big surge lifts my entire body, then lowers it. I stroke through the wave, pulling harder with my arms and adding some extra snap to my whip kick.

Lord, it feels good.

These past months often have been difficult ones.

People I love have died. Their deaths came one after another, like the pounding of a jackhammer. Their departures carved their marks in me. I mourned the loss of souls who made this often-hard world a more pleasant place and missed the way they could lighten the day just by being part of it.

Their deaths also reminded me that my own tenure on this earth was not limitless—and made me wonder at moments if time had not begun to pass me by, if the immutable tides of eternity were not dragging me inexorably into the past.

Such thinking is not comforting at a time when responsibilities and opportunities, both personal and professional, seemed to multiply.

It has been hard not to question upon occasion whether I still was up to meeting them.

Even now, as the ocean around me rises and falls, the water rushing over me as I swim, one shoulder and one knee don’t work as they once did. They talk to me as I stroke and kick, reminding me as I move through the waves that I no longer am a young man.

That I must be smarter, more disciplined and more calculating than when I had known fewer springtime.

I now am beyond the outcropping of rocks.

Time to turn back.

I tread water for a moment, feeling the surge of the Atlantic roll all around, the waves buffeting me as I contemplate a horizon without beginning or end. As I bob there in the water, the closing lines from Tennyson’s “Ulysses” pop into my head:

“Tho much is taken, much abides; and tho’

“We are not now that strength which in old days

“Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

“One equal temper of heroic hearts,

“Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

Words for an aging soul to live by.

I start swimming back.

The wind has picked up, increasing the chop and spray of the water. I swim into it, stretching out the strokes for extra power, sometimes plunging through the waves, sometimes riding over them.

My shoulder and my knee still talk to me, reminding me that they are not what they once were.

That I am not what I once was.

But they still function.

I still can meet and move through the waves as they roll over me.

When I reach the beach, I step out of the water, an old man washed clean by the sea.

A world of both possibilities and dangers awaits.

My knee buckles for a moment as I plant my foot in the sand. It, like me, has been made weaker by time and fate.

But we’ll both limp forward, if limp we must, to meet what lies ahead.

For we were made to strive, to seek, to find….

And not to yield.