I've been pulled towards the ocean for a long time. When I stand on the shore and
watch sails filled with wind to slip past towards the horizon, my heart
stretches towards them. I used to walk along docks in the late evening, past
boats with their lights off, quietly waiting for someone to step on board. I
wanted to take my shoes off, to slide open the hatch, to untie the lines, but I
was only ever a stranger, walking through a world I wanted so badly to be a part
of. Now I am a sailor, and I live on a boat and all of those feelings have
remained the same – but there is nonetheless one question which has
always remained unanswered: Why am I so drawn to sailing? Why is anyone? This
great pull towards the ocean and towards sails permeates all of the choices I've
made. But this pull, this force which seems to perpetually guide my life
towards the ocean, is an enigma. I'm not the first to have felt it. There are
books, by other souls who are helplessly drawn towards the sea.
The books are adventure stories, about great voyages and circumnavigations – but
they're all the same really. They all exist because of the pull. The authors
feel it, and sometimes they try to describe it. So then, what is the pull? Is
it a vestige of human evolution away from the ocean, constantly making us wish
to return to its cool soft embrace? Is it some kind of quest for freedom? Any
answer that I've ever come across has always left me dissatisfied. Surely
that's not all, I always think. Surely the pull is more
than just that. So then I will try to answer the question in another way.
I want to go on great adventures and throw myself into new places, but I also
know that I love having a home to call my own, to create my own life in. Second, I
want to feel like I belong in a community of lifelong friends, but I also
need solitude. Third, I want to feel entirely self-sufficient, capable of
doing everything that I need to do for myself, but I also want to find people
who I can trust to do those things with me. Fourth I want to feel confident,
joyous, calm, capable, free, and surrounded by love. And sailing is my answer to all
of those desires.
It's an intensification, a powerful microcosm of all the kinds of virtues,
traits, and circumstances that I desire in life. Sailing is freedom and it is
self-reliance, it is peace and quiet and solitude
combined with the promise of lifelong friendships. It encapsulates so perfectly
in its storms and its calms the exact set of feelings challenges and rewards
that I strive for in life.
Sailboats offer everything that I am seeking, boiled down into a thick
reduction of oversaturated emotions. But sailboats are not quick. They are slow,
smoldering pleasures, sometimes disguised as great inconveniences, caught up in
storms and tossed by powerful and unstoppable waves. The love is slow. It is
inconvenient. And that's why the world hasn't suddenly all moved to the ocean –
because to do so, you need to firmly and completely believe in the absolute value
of what you're seeking. You have to believe that the long, painful, difficult
joys are the most worth chasing – that transient, quick, easy joys will never
come close to truly satisfying your soul. And this is difficult. We live in a world
of convenience, and convenience kills the intrinsic motivation to work hard and
long for that which you truly want. So that is what I believe the pull is all
about. It's really just about finding meaning as a human, and sailboats are
really just a way to find that meaning in a method that I believe is strong and
deeply satisfying. But that said let's not dwell on this too much. Bernard Moitessier
was a sailor and an author who felt the pull keenly, and he wrote the
following. "Rummaging through the atom, a scientist may someday reduce joy and
inner peace to a mathematical formula. It would be interesting but surely too
complicated for me, and with his cleverness he might spoil something
essential." Perhaps we don't really need to understand the pull in order to feel
it and love it and answer it. Perhaps it just is. Surely there's a reason why
waves and heartbeats are both so rhythmic, unceasing. So we go, and we set
sail into the ocean and point our bow on a beam reach to the wind – because why
fight to go in any other direction than the one which makes us most happy?
you