I am keeping a journal and taking hundreds of pictures and will try to get them up on my site in a timely manner but I thought I would start with this as it explains the beginning...how it all unfolded. Perhaps after reading this, my future rantings will make more sense. People frequently ask me why, after a decade in Silicon Valley, did I leave hi-tech or if I have any regrets about completely turning my life upside down, pulling the carpet out from under me... In a word, NO! I don’t mean to be flip or casual about it, because it was anything but that, but the way I know I’m on the right path is that even at the worst, most down of days, did I regret my decision. I might prefer to not be standing over the deep fryer or gutting a fish or eating “merde” from some chef at that particular moment but, at the time, never did I wish I were back in my Dilbert cube.
It’s hard for me to express my feelings around this so I have included an excerpt from Herb Payson’s book, Advice to the Sealorn, about his and his wife’s decision to sail around the world. He describes it brilliantly, perfectly and expresses precisely how I felt! I was so excited to read this and know that I could finally convey, through his powerful prose, the turmoil that was churning inside of me. This is courtesy a former co-worker who, like Mr. Payson, did indeed leave his job to sail around the world on his boat. I bolded a few sentences below that really hit home for me. Here is a snippet that I hope touches your heart the way it did mine...
"...Looking back, I've come to believe that it takes more courage of a certain kind to stay in suburbia and do the expected thing than it does to sell out and sail off. I came to a point where I realized that my talent was modest, that I would never become a star in the galaxy of fame, that if I didn't change I would, for the rest of my life, do my best, pay my debts, and finally die the mediocre middle-class man that I really was. And if that sounds a little strong, I intend it to, because those are some of the feelings that allowed me to quit quixotically. And for those feelings I shall be eternally grateful.
Money is not the only thing one has to spend; the other thing is a life. The difference is that, with life, you never know how much is in the bank, or what your balance is. Your life is your inheritance. As soon as you realize this, you start trying to spend your life wisely.
Nice, round, imposing thoughts. But what do they mean? They meant, to me, make changes. Radical changes. And Nancy and I made the changes blindly, having no idea what we'd discover about ourselves in the process. I've said this before, but I'm going to repeat it in case you, too, suffer from the same thing I did. Middle-class malaise is more than discontent. It's being worried and unhappy without being able to pinpoint the cause. It's anxiety. I suddenly realized that I haven't used the word anxiety more than a dozen times since we went cruising. Because anxiety to me has a special meaning: It's a general angst. Some of it stems from my upbringing, which said that if you make regular trips to the doctor for a checkup and keep up with your insurance premiums and make yourself enough money to keep you in beef and gin and attend church, at least on holy days, you'll be safe. So you do those things, but the Truth, which lives within all of us no matter how badly we treat it, says it's a lie. You aren't safe, you've just managed to bury any and all recognition of what the threats are.
So I worried about cancer, and monetary debt, and why my palms would run with sweat whenever I drove in rush-hour traffic, and the sins I was piling up, and all the other stand-ins we invent for Death. "You'll never get out of this life alive" is the barstool wisdom. And as soon as you admit that there's going to be an end to your life, you begin to be concerned with what, to my mind, is the only existential concern: What do I do with what I have left?
And, of course, the answer to that is different for everyone, and this is a good thing, as there's too many of us out here already. The waters are crowded, and all the neat, secret places are being filled up. But that's okay. Doing something is one thing. What's important is how you do it, and knowing why you're doing it. When a man sails his Columbia 45 to waypoint #352, drops his anchor in a lonely lagoon of glass-clear water, and looks around at whispering palm trees and beaches of golden sand and asks, "What's all the fuss about?" you know that, GPS or not, that man is lost. For Nancy and me the decision to cut loose and go cruising was radical and wrenching, and I'm grateful for that, too. It was a time of changes, many of which were painful. And after all the pain and problems I was damn well going to discover something important, whether it was out there or not.
And it wasn't out there, ever; it was inside me. Out there was merely the environment that allowed me to see it. Because in the cruising life, cause and effect are tangible and intangible. For someone who is always going to worry no matter what, cruising is the greatest possible medium. There are so many real things to worry about on a voyage, and real things to do about them, who in his right mind would need to create more?
None of this came to me in a Eurekaflash. It came in bits and pieces. One piece: We were delivering a leaky boat from Tahiti to California that would surely take on water beyond our ability to pump it out if we ran into an enduring storm. I was worrying, as usual, about every little thing. Tired of my fretting, Nancy finally brought me out of it.
"Come on, Herb, what's the worst thing that could happen?"
"We could die," I said.
"Exactly," she said, and went back to her book..." "
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