Saturday 30 August 2008

Pilot House

Yesterday’s photo was of the Pilot House in Irvine Harbour. The Pilot House stands at the entrance to the harbour, and provided vessels with an indication of the state of the tide – and therefore, the depth of water in the channel in to the harbour. The idea was that a serious of ‘globes’ were raised and lowered automatically according to the state of the tide.

I can remember the pilot house working when I was a child, but – sadly – it has been out of action and in a state of disrepair for many years now. The globes are lying around the building, slowly rusting away.

I don’t know if the pilot house was unique. However, it is indicative of a once thriving harbour, which is not well used nowadays.

It strikes me that our lives could use a pilot house system – indicating when we are operating at capacity, when we are fully charged, when we need an injection of something to get us back on track etc, etc. Unfortunately the indicators for our well-being are not as obvious as globes rising up a mast outside a building. So we need to find other ways of assessing how we’re doing. This is part of ‘developing daily discipline’, which I’ll write about another time – and maybe in another place.

1 comment:

Ted Marshall said...

Excellent, thought-provoking analogy. And I've never heard of this idea of a Pilot House, I wonder with you if it was unique. Sounds like a project ripe for being taken under the wing of some conservationist group or other for rebuilding.