Letters from sea: On risk
Inviting in the right kind of peril
Longing is nothing without its dangerous edge, which cuts and wounds us while setting us free, and beckons us exactly because of the human need to invite the right kind of peril. The foundational instinct that we are here essentially to risk ourselves in the world, that we are a form of invitation to others and to otherness, that we are meant to hazard ourselves for the right thing, for the right woman, or the right man, for a son or a daughter, for the right work, or for a gift given against all the odds. In longing we move, and are moving, from a known but abstracted elsewhere to a beautiful, about-to-be-reached someone, something, or somewhere we want to call our own.
- David Whyte
Last weekend we transited the Panama Canal. Which still, as I write those words sitting in my little floating home that’s now in the Caribbean, seems a little unreal. After all, just three years ago, I went from having basically no sailing experience whatsoever to trading in our house for a 40 foot boat, jumping from life on solid ground to one on the moody and moving ocean, from safety and ease to perpetual risk and challenge. And now, today, I have somehow sailed nearly eight thousand nautical miles and crossed a continent.
Our journey down the Pacific has been violent and trying and beautiful and wild— our three years aboard have felt like ten, packed with more significant and powerful moments than any one person aught to have in a lifetime. I have sailed eight thousand nautical miles and crossed a continent, and yet I still feel vulnerable and a just little bit scared almost all of the time out here. That is how I know I’m paying attention. That is, of course, what the ocean commands.
A few months ago, a boat our size was sailing from Panama to French Polynesia, making dinner as the sun set in perfect weather, when they struck a whale and their entire vessel was underwater and gone in fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes.
The moments of surreal beauty and serenity in this life at sea are earned through an ever-present awareness of just how small and fragile you really are, and just how little it would take — one tiny navigation error or unexpected turn — to lose your entire home or your life in an instant. In regular intervals, but mostly when lightning strikes are landing a few hundred feet away from our 60 foot metal mast, or when we are getting tossed like a toy in 45 knots, or when a small fishing boat approaches us at high speeds while way offshore, I wonder why in the actual fuck I am doing any of this, at all. I wonder what it is in me, what it is in us, that compels us towards risk, towards these choices that turn us away from security and that carry within them a certainty of absolutely nothing at all except for the singular guarantee of an eventual tidal wave of discomfort that will flood us, flood everything, twisting and shaping our lives in new and curious unforeseen patterns.
