Who is in the lifeboat?

I read this great quote a few days ago in "Patience with God" by Frank Schaeffer, and laughed very hard over it.  He said that he would rather be in a lifeboat with Christopher Hitchens (the avowed atheist) than with any hardline evangelical/fundamentalist Christian.  His reasoning was that Hitchens wouldn't try to make the lifeboat sink in order to make Jesus come back sooner and that Hitchens might even bring along a case of wine.

I've gotten to thinking tonight about lifeboats and life(giving) resources, and thinking about who is in my "lifeboat."  Wondering what to do about a partner, a boat mate, who consumes more resources than I do.  Who consumes more of MY resources, who seems to need, or at least want, always more of and from ME than I do, ever, from him. Most of the time I find myself building structures, internal and external, and contemplating survival strategies.

Does he want more than he "should"?  Do I have less to give than I "should"?  Can we ever come to resolution or sustainable middle ground about the allocation of resources?  I don't know how to negotiate fairly and well when it seems like I turn into myself to fill my need while he seems to turn to me to fill his.

I find myself ... I want to turn inward more so as to avoid becoming stingy or selfish.  Harder faster wiser boundaries so that I retain integrity of self and don't descend beyond the precipice of the slippery slope I know this all to be.

All requires vigilance, and the energy and awareness and time to see, contemplate, know, understand -- these things that seem only available when I do well what my previous post considered.

Must continue to seek my internal North.  I alone hold the compass on this lifeboat.  I never had a navigation course so I'm charting by instinct and the star chart of life experience.

A few weeks ago I sailed for the first time with a gracious skipper who believes in teaching charting and navigation the "old fashioned" way.  It was just me and him on his boat, and he sat me down first thing in front of some charts (maps) and gave me a couple of strange tools and told me to find magnetic north instead of true north.  He taught me the difference, and I learned that "true north" is less reliable than one might think based on the name.  Magnetic north changes as Earth revolves and the other planets in our solar system also move.  None of it is as simplistic as where the "North Pole" is located.  It's all rather organic, changing along with nature and very life forces of matter, land, sea, etc.

This knowledge brings me some comfort.  If I expected things to be easy, clear cut, predictable, unchanging, as set and dependable as an "always NORTH of North POLE" I could grow very discombobulated by the uncertainties of life, the questions, the what-ifs or "wait 'n sees."

Boundaries are important when living aboard a lifeboat.  So are charting skills, which the ancient mariners had based on knowledge of the heavens - the sky and the stars.  There's an awful lot of wisdom to be contemplated there...