Steady As She Goes

SAILING ON CHESAPEAKE BAY - NARA - 548494 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Our family loved to sail. My step-dad, mom, brother and step-brothers and myself spent many a weekend in the Chesapeake Bay sailing our family boat.
It wasn’t a yacht, by any stretch of the imagination. Just a small craft, designed for family outings scooting around the Del-Mar-Va Peninsula or down to Annapolis for the weekend. There was a cozy cabin, a nice cockpit from which to steer and of course the bow, which was my favorite spot to be.
Learning to sail is like apprenticing with a craftsman. You can be taught how to steer and manipulate the sails, navigate, and tack. But you cannot be taught how to interpret the wind and water. Those things require time and patience. You have to open up a special sensitivity to those things in your mind. It takes practice to be sure.
Lately, I have found myself missing the wind and water. It’s been uncounted years since I’ve even set foot on a sailboat, let alone any other type of water vessel. I miss it profoundly. While I live within a few short miles of my favorite trail, and while I can always find succor there for the stresses and strains of everyday life, even in the woods a good stiff breeze will remind me of how wonderful it would be to set my boots on the step, slide on my deck shoes and grab the lines and hoist the jib and mainsail and fly across the water.
In everyday life, it is common to feel a need to ‘get on with’ or ‘get through’ the day. We have many stresses on us daily. Money, careers, children, parents and social lives all of which seem to hold sway at the same time. Some days, from the time my head leaves the pillow in the morning, until it returns that evening, I haven’t had a chance to even stop to catch my breath. I feel sometimes that I am caught between duties. Duties to my family, to my friends, to my work and to my responsibilities as an adult. At other times, things are so mundane, slow and uninteresting that boredom grows across my mind and I adopt the ‘thousand mile stare’.
Yet, either way, regardless if I’m praying for Tuesday to hurry up and end already, or wondering where the weekend flew off to, sailing provides a good illustration of how we handle the hectivity and the doldrums of life.
The key is to remember a simple truth my step dad taught me about being on a boat. You’re never in control. You’re only borrowing the water, sharing the wind. You never get to choose what kind of weather you have, only how you deal with the weather that comes.
As an example, we once had beautiful, calm, chilly fall sailing, and a squall came up and hit so hard that we were all covered in fine gritty sleet and the whole deck was a sheet of ice, not to mention heavy chop. We got the sails down, motored to a nearby port, and battened down the hatches and waited for the squall to pass. I realized as I sat shivering in the cabin and my mom prepared hot soup, that I would never have been able to deal with that squall by myself.
Much of what I learned on that boat was technical. Which line to pull, how to steer, how to tie knots, how to tack and turn. But the deeper lessons in all of those physical and mental tasks was knowing why we tie the knots, when to pull the lines, where to steer and when to tack and turn.
So my step dad’s advice was good and true, and it rings true on solid ground with the weather of our lives, too. No matter what a day brings, if things go our way, or if they don’t; if tragedy and loss hold sway or if joy and hope for new life is the celebration, we must always keep calm, one eye on the compass, one eye on the sky and take the wind that comes.