Sailing through life?

If you want to sail you need a boat, one capable of doing exactly what you want, however what you want changes the boat you need. There is no such thing as a perfect boat for all circumstances, just as a perfect life does not exist, every boat is a comprise between weight and speed, energy efficiency and reliability, price and size, different boats are better for different purposes, though you only need the boat that is going to get you where you want to go in the style that you desire, which begs the question what do you want? This is a topic that I keep on returning to as it is the design criteria first that steers every other decision in your life, the type of boat that you choose wholly depends on how you wish to live your life and how you actually live it. The freedom of sail means that sometimes the wind does not blow, whereas a power boat will always get you there in a straight line but the noise and rush breaks your relationship with nature, we have to make choices and they effect everything.

Sailing is always a compromise, the ocean is a harsh environment and even with limitless amounts of money there are always choices. If you want a large living space it means that there are going to have limits on where you can go, shallow bays are out of bounds due to your depth, large boat can not go up small rivers, even many harbours, you might have luxury but there are only so many places you can go. It is obvious with boats, but even a house limits your geography, if you live in Texas you can not have lunch in Paris, and that is ignoring the financial aspects that ties you to where your house is located if you do not want the waste of having empty houses everywhere in the world, as well as the legal and maintenance hassles (one house probably takes a week of your time dealing with these things each year). What is less obvious is that your character has a similar effect on how you live your life, what you enjoy and how you use the place you live.

If you are open to anything, you can ditch a fixed location by using an alternative such as living in Airbnb’s and hotels whilst travelling the world, which as well as being expensive, you have to rely on the market place to always have a place to stay, and sometimes it fails, you always have the risk that there will not be a place in the inn or you have to plan months ahead and lost some of that freedom of not having a house. If you want the freedom to go anywhere at anytime that still limits you to short term options, having to carry everything you own, always being the traveller and never arriving, you lose the chance of a community and bumping into that girl or boy again, everything is a single use and chance. There is always a compromise and you have to make choices about what is important to you, there are no right answers, only wrong answers for you.

We give up freedom when we take on responsibilities, when we say we care about this thing or person, we are giving them our duty of care to act in their interests as well as our own, but these things are not a drag, they are an anchor that keeps us in place where we want to be. More than that they give our lives meaning and purpose (maybe not the whole meaning of life but they are a good place to start), they give us a direction toward which we can sail. Losing freedom is a cost of love it is a comprise so that our journey has meaning rather than just being a pointless exercise in wandering, and there is a time and a place for both in a fulfilling life, freedom and excitement is a good thing in teenagers, they should be trying random things to set which ones suit them, it is the act of finding out what sort of person you are, but we all change, we all start wanting more than just freedom to do whatever we want.

Not that we ever get that chance there are always comprises, and the more familiar you are with what comprises you are making, the happier you are going to be with making them. The shame comes when you are comprising without even realising why you are doing it, when you have given up so much for no reason or pay-out, when you are doing something because that is what you do without ever asking the question why am I doing what I do. If it just because that is what your friends, family, society does, that is not a reason for you doing it without thinking, if your family have always been accountants for five generations that is not a reason for you doing it, it is certainly a good option, you probably already know the profession language, you have access to work experience, interviews, but if you want to be an astronaut, if you could be the greatest one whoever lived if you just considered it, explored the first steps, play, experiment rather than taking the unthinking route that will leave you missing something you never even knew you wanted.

It is by taking lots of tiny steps that you can start walking towards something better for you, doing new things, unexpected things, making games out of changes, taking causal suggestions and running with them, by sailing from one place to another’s we can find ourselves. That is the pleasure of sailing through life, you get to be blown around, if there is a headwind you do not plough straight into it, you tack from one side to the other and allow it to push you sideways each time moving closer to where you want to go. If you have no wind you mend your sails or read a book, when you have the wind behind you, you make good time, you do not stop for lunch, you use the comprises that you have made to your own advantage, you play the cards that you are given and if you are losing, you lose by the numbers you do not throw the table up into the table and say the game was unfair.

You have to take the weather as it is, you do not get to pick and choose which days you are going to turn up and play, we play everyday and we are always all in. It is by making a game out of life, by pretending that we are sailing that we take the pressure off always getting things right and that we make better choices, that we succeed more often, by being presence to what is happening, we get to observe whether we are happy or stressed, and when we do something that pleases us we know to repeat it. When we sail through life we allow the flow of life to guide us, we stop fighting to be perfect now, to stay on one course without correction from our sense of self, how we are feeling and instead follow the weather that life throws at us. By repeatedly changing course depending on that inner sense of joy, that internal silence which speaks without words (somewhere near the heart and some would call the soul or source) that we get to know our real self, our presence with grace, by listening and following that internal compass, we might not know where we will end up but we will always be heading towards a happier place.