A good friend of mine1 recently bought a sailing ship after years of sailing on other people’s ships. This is a guy whose name has become synonymous for ‘he who fixes’, and while I’d love to use his name to continue propagating that, I’ll just call him ‘Fixer’.
Fixer loves motorcycles, sailing, and good company. That he did purchase the sailing ship didn’t surprise me, it was a matter of time because Fixer had been going out to sea and paying to do so.
Why would someone do that? To get experience. Why would they want that experience? To buy a ship of one’s own. It all makes sense – so why did he buy the ship?
He wanted it. But why did he want it? Fixer would have to answer that himself, yet I think at least part of it is the challenge. When you’re on a ship, you have what you have and you make do. You have to be prepared, you have to know what to do when things go sideways, and as a reward you get to have the wind through your hair, the smell of sea air2 , and the physicality of it at times.
I’ve always found large expanses of water to be therapeutic. On a crowded planet, the oceans are our last refuges.
The Coffee Thoughts.
I thought of this while having breakfast and coffee at one of my new haunts. I was sitting, as I normally do, by myself at the bar, and this morning the barista had my order in my spot before I got to the door – she’d seen me in the parking lot and had not planned for me to talk to a guy in the parking lot a while, and her countenance showed a bit of disappointment that I was tardy. It was still hot, it was still good, and somehow I felt I had robbed her of something she had worked hard for.
I ate and drank as I tried puzzling this out, as well as how well she did and did not seem to be handling it. I’m always suspicious of a woman who says, “It’s fine”, and she had said that. This delves into deeper and deeper questions which are well beyond the scope of this. I was deep in thought, as I like to be since to have a brain and to not use it seems like a waste of a brain.
Out of the blue, this guy pulls up and sits on a stool next to me, despite there being other stools further away, and he’s jabbering on the phone. This is like the guy who comes into the men’s room and despite having other options, picks the urinal right next to yours.
This guy was effectively urinating on my shoes.
Here I was, just minding my own business, when an annoying human wanders next to me, sits down, and has complete conversations with someone who isn’t even there. A few hundred years ago they would have dragged him to a sanitarium.
I hate mobile phones and the manners they have produced. I’m sure that at least his mother thought he was a nice person, but to me he was simply an irritant, a fly buzzing in a way that I understood and saying nothing I wanted to hear. This, to me, is a large swathe of society, and I pulled up Facebook and started looking over the ship in the pictures Fixer had posted.
That’s when I decided to write this.
Getting Lost.
There’s a wonderful thing about getting lost in something – sometimes you do need to wander to see where you are. More importantly, fully engaging your brain in an enterprise that is both mentally and physically tiring allows an escape from the burdens of everything else you have to deal with in life.
Fixer likes motorcycles and sailboats, a good merging of physical and mental engagement with the universe, where the two become one and the one is most definitely human.
If you haven’t experienced it in life, you have not yet lived, that feeling of state of flow.
These days, it seems like people are wandering around with cowbells, tambourines and harmonicas to disrupt flow, intruding into our lives like sexually transmitted diseases – yet there was no consent. Maybe this is a product of getting older, a temperament refined over half a century of interruptions and annoyances with sparse periods of ‘time at sea’.
I know plenty of people with boats. Some like going really fast. Some like line fishing, which done right is a meditation. Fixer, though, does it for different reasons.
Fixer grows. He does things to grow, and the boat is no different, and all the while I imagine it’s a therapy unto itself.
We all need more of that, and less people peeing on our feet.
Where do you find your flow? When is the last time you did it? Isn’t it time you did it again?
Of course it is.
- There was a time when ‘good friend’ would have been considered more redundant than it is now. Social networks have diluted what a friend is, I think, but how does one measure that? ↩︎
- It’s dimethyl sulfide, released by microbes, which gives the smell. Ozone has nothing to do with it, that’s a myth from the Victorian era. ↩︎
