Wit & Attitude Quote by Marjorie Holmes

Progress gets framed here as a moral discipline, not a mood. Holmes isn’t interested in where you’re “at” in life so much as whether you’re acting with intention, and she smuggles that demand in through a clean nautical metaphor. Direction beats position because position can be a vanity metric: a snapshot you can curate, defend, or compare. Direction implies time, choice, and accountability. It’s harder to fake.

The sailing image does heavy lifting. “The port of heaven” gives the destination a lightly religious glow without turning the line into a sermon; it’s aspiration with a compass. Then Holmes introduces the part self-help tends to skip: winds change. Sometimes the world cooperates (tailwind), sometimes it resists (headwind). The subtext is almost corrective, a rebuttal to the fantasy that the right plan will eliminate friction. She normalizes opposition as part of the trip, not proof you picked the wrong ocean.

The real sting is in the negatives: “not drift, nor lie at anchor.” Drifting is passive living - letting circumstances write your biography. Anchoring is a different trap: safety as stagnation, the comfort of being “settled” as a way to avoid risk, growth, or disappointment. Holmes, a mid-century American writer steeped in practical spirituality, lands on an ethic that fits her era’s blend of faith and self-reliance: you don’t get credit for dreaming of movement. You get it for sailing, especially when the wind isn’t flattering you.