sailing

To Flow.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

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.

  1. 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? ↩︎
  2. 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. ↩︎

Seas of Humanity

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

_JMB6699LoIf I had been born a few hundred years ago, I would likely have been on a ship staring out into the horizon, my body rolling to the waves, heading to places not on known maps if only to get away from all that traps us.

Some people are comfortable in what society dictated before we were born, where it is all well defined by those who came before, a world which worked for those that defined it and their descendants. So much of our world works that way, and as humanity grows older the clay of systems becomes brick, hardened, inflexible, immobile.

A child born today will find in adulthood that they pay taxes that were agreed upon by others long ago, that they may worship in a religion that while they may be faithful is an accident of geography, that they have more or less opportunity due to a socioeconomic status that they had nothing to do with. Even our bodies conspire against us in this way, subject to genetics that some deny even as they breed animals. Few, if any, break out of these shells, and as time goes by it becomes harder and harder to break out of them.

In fact, simply traveling without permission from authorities we didn’t create across borders we didn’t draw to see things in other places is illegal, something I myself was born into, but which I have watched become more and more harsh. The nomadic roots of our human past find themselves in shrinking containers and, when the container cracks under the pressure, someone dutifully comes along and mends the cracks with gold to make the container that much more attractive to those outside, but less bearable for those within.

We live lives where we dig coal, and for those few of us fortunate, we dig coal in ways that we enjoy, and at points when we look up from our task and dare to look to the horizon, someone or something cracks the whip to keep our noses down. And so we go, nose to the coal grindstone of ‘life’, in the hope that the light at the end of the tunnel will draw nearer as someone long ago promised.

A lifetime of slaving at something or the other, or many things, to be rewarded later when we are old. The 50 year old in the convertible corvette, what’s left of his hair blowing in the wind, the tired and empty joke of decades ago.

Nature reclaimsI’ve been left in this life rediscovering elder things, repurposing that which came before, exploring the abandoned as if it were new only because it was new to me, sharing it with others who found it new for themselves. Photographing things, writing about things, and watching parts of a past we romanticize only because it is abandoned, maybe because inside we feel abandoned by the gilded cages we live in – some more gilded than others.

I do not know. I do feel.

There is little rationality we find in such feelings in systems that tell us even how to feel – if we’re a bit too different, if you rebel just a bit too much against the system, we are either criminal or someone with some form of mental or emotional disorder, rarely both, and based on… things we find we are unable to control a few steps beyond the facade.

Any port in a stormWith all of this mind, I close my eyes at time and escape into the view of a bay with my gear packed, thinking of a world where I can sail away from what is established and able to push into the unknown, where the laws of nature outweigh the rules of the land, where it is unsafe and where one’s worth is gauged not by artificial structures but instead whether or not you are a good person in a storm.

And I open my eyes and find myself sailing through the artificial structures of society, dancing on the waves of what people have been taught to think and believe and how to think and believe, and realize I am sailing across the most dangerous waters we could create on maps that shift even as we cross latitudes and longitudes, having lost members of the steadfast crew as we moved to the horizon of humanity, and I find some comfort in that.