This post was inspired by my visit to the National Lighthouse Museum in Staten Island, New York.

George Bernard Shaw said lighthouses were built to serve. What about the lighthouse keepers, then? They served not only locals and sea-farers but the very lighthouses themselves. They sat awake in the bleakest, starless hours while all others slept, and dreamed of grander destinies.

A life of such servitude comes at a price. It is lonely. Others don’t always understand the desire to give and look for motive where there is none. Interpret humility as lowliness and wonder why a person would choose that over power. Such minds will never understand that the most powerful act anyone can carry out in this bewildering universe, is to give.

Most lighthouse keepers were men. The women who took up such posts were typically those who had never married or were widows. Looking at their pictures mounted on museum boards, I wonder if those friendless men and women ever invited broad-shouldered sailors into their sleeping quarters during the wild, windswept hours before daylight broke once more over the horizon.

I wonder if they ever wanted to feel something other than froth and sea spray against their skin. If they yearned to be lit only by the shine of a lover’s eyes for once. Or if they resigned themselves to the fact that the moment they took up their station at the top of the tower, they had committed their whole being to the ocean and would never know another master.

Even in the modern world, we are all slaves to something. Smart phones. Alcohol. Sugar rushes. Nicotine. Diet routines. If one were to choose an overlord of their own free will, there are much worse prospects than the ocean. She who is bound to carry out the moon’s bidding.

Yes, the salty waves are merciless at times. Cold. Murderous even. But they are also a source of endless kaleidoscopic beauty. Perhaps most importantly, despite her tides, the ocean is one of the most constant forces we know. She remembers our beginning and will witness our end. In an existence that churns just as vigorously as the North Sea on a grey February day, it is heartening to think that even when we are long gone something that once touched us will live on. I expect the lighthouse keepers understood this idea only too well.