Letters from sea: Burn the playbook

A new year's wish for us all to walk the wild paths

For a minute there, I forgot. The last year has been one that somehow took from me the hope of possibility, leaving me with no certainties to cling to except the vague sense that my chance had passed, my world shrunk down to nothing but a list of all I can never do now because it’s far too late. For a minute there, I found myself trudging through the sticky swamp of doubt and indifference and complacency and disembodiment. For a minute there, I fell asleep.

This was, in part, due to a particularly challenging year of life on the ocean — they say that living on a sailboat will deliver you both your highest highs and your lowest lows (can confirm), and each new low felt like a sledgehammer, a blow to an expansive and equanimous interiority I spent years cultivating, chipping away at my confidence, hope, and internal peace. But this chipping away was also, perhaps, in part due to the universal experience of age and time, of no longer feeling or considering myself as particularly young — that subtle but notable transition when we start to regard the years behind us as holding more possibility and life than whatever perpetually shrinking years ahead of us might.

Maybe it’s time that does this, but maybe more accurately, it’s our culture’s structures of time — the idea that we are only gifted a few short, specific windows in which particular choices must be made correctly in order to do life right. An idea of time that tends to usher us all swiftly and obediently into the same patterns, hitting the same milestones on the same schedules, wanting and working for the same things, reaching desperately for the same celebrated outcomes. And here I was, after intentionally or not-so-intentionally setting fire to just about all of those standards and pillars of accomplishment, standing in the ashes of it all, and for a moment there, I panicked— wondering if I had just incinerated my entire future.