Could you live on a boat?
I know you have read the other posts about how amazing living on a boat is. You have already seen all the dreamy, adorable, nothing-out-of-place blogs where it looks remarkably easy and the weather is fine, much like the adorable, dreamy blogs about living in your car, I mean van, where you make pumpkin spice lattes every morning and you’ll be 20 and French or just wearing a bikini. After getting to really test it out over the last two years, This may sell ads, but I don’t think it is true or even the point. The great joy of living on a boat is the opportunity to grow mentally. The ability to live on a boat is one way to say yes to the complex terror, joy, and hardship that is full living.
If you’ve found yourself in the position of saying, “Oh, I could never….” or “Well they might do it but I am more special and need…” 0r “I need my morning latte” you may have created a story about who you are that limits who you can become and this is a great place to start.
I have clients tell me all the time about what parts of life they have learned to say “no” to. I get it, I have my own self-imposed limits. But the thing about safe harbors is that they make the places you can go pretty limited and create for some pretty cramped quarters. I have a friend who has had so many knee surgeries that just looking at stairs can send her into a state of terror. I have clients that have been abused and now find the thought of being in a relationship unthinkable. Break-ups they can’t get over, weddings that must be x dollars or else, a death that looms heavy over their hearts, we all have our lines we draw to keep from getting hurt again. “Mend my life!” The voices call out. We can mend and accommodate them in perpetuity. People live and die that way all the time. We can continue to live on only the first floor of our enormous multi-story psychic house, but the accommodations get pretty weird and we miss the best views. We may be able to jerry-rig* something fairly comfortable but the price is that we never get to live our life- the one we earn by facing what it is we need to face. Spoiler alert: a guest bedroom and half bath or pumpkin spice lattes are probably not going to get you there.
The dreamy van and boat blogs do us a disservice because they promote a weird fantasy where you will live in 100 sq ft and still be just as mentally inflexible as ever. They say something like, “Even in a tiny van I figured out how to change everything but still keep everything psychically the same.” The boat with the girl in the bikini is marketing the idea that you don’t have to really free your heart, you can get a bikini and an espresso machine and all those fears and insecurities will go away. They are right about the first part but not the second. Whether you could live on a boat comes down to the ability to stop avoiding and lean in to discomfort and get it to work for you.
If we don’t do the inner work, it doesn’t really matter if it is a boat or a van or a mansion or a Tesla or killer abs. Four weeks in to those easy workouts or knee-deep in bilge water, you’re still stuck living on the psychic first floor. You’re still saying no to life. We all know this deep down. We know that this is very, very tempting marketing. It not the nature of life, the path to freedom, or what is going to make our heart burst with joy. If you think living on a boat will make you free, you’re pitching your own marketing campaign. It won’t. What it can do is reveal your fears and teach you how to tolerate a million tiny discomforts.
As Victor Frankl put it, “those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.” Or, as Matthew McConaghey put it, you can define what success is for you by eliminating everything else. Or as Carl Jung put it, “What you resist persists.” They are all basically saying the same thing: the feelings and situations we avoid are the very ones that can set us free and when we are free we can bear almost anything. If you can find your fears and work with them, you could live on a boat but probably don’t need to. If you are like me and were so distracted by the noise I didn’t even know what they were, then you have to go back to the step of eliminating everything else. Once you’ve got your little house of horrors set up, you’re ready to start the work. And make no mistake, it is work. Dirty, grimy, decidedly not glamorous work. But it is not noise. It is learning to live in an enormous, gorgeous psychic house filled with minor, non-irritating discomforts. I’ve seen it happen more times than I can count now but it never gets less amazing to witness.
Ten years ago, my sister adopted a tiny shepherd mix for $20 from a kill shelter in North Carolina.
It was during her senior year of college, as she was applying to grad programs and studying for her exams. I came to visit for her graduation and got to meet Layla. She was hard to miss, as her favorite activity was to squeak her toys over and over and over…and over. After mere seconds, I was crumbling beneath the repetition and volume of the sound. As my sanity eroded I asked my sister about it and she calmly replied that it was improving her mental stability. Touché. She knew then what it would take me many years to learn as I now grapple with my boat, work, van, and now disabled dog- if you love what you are doing, to paraphrase Bukowski, the rest is just a test of how much you want it. If you really want it, the inconveniences and breakdowns and problems won’t confuse you, distract you or even slow you down. The point of a happy life isn’t that you don’t have problems, it’s that problems you have are ones you want. These are the squeaks that provide a direct line to your heart
If you are scared to change or even just resist being uncomfortable, try staying where you are and keep up the maintenance routine. It will getting increasingly stagnant, smelly, and uneasy because the squeaking won’t be the dog, it will be your heart and your mind. This is the choice. Maybe the only choice. The consequence of indulging our limits is that even if the boat/house/van/dog gets bigger and better, the mind stays small and for that we then have to make all kinds of accommodations. Mend, mend, mend. Squeak, squeak, squeak. The heart wants to be free. Our symptoms and fears are internal squeaks, the guides that get us where we need to go. Listen to these squeaks or put up with the ten million squeaks of noise until the end.
A friend who hiked the Pacific Crest Trail relayed that part of the hike is discovering your fears though what you packed. What you carry is what you are afraid of whether that is far too much food, extra clothes to fend of cold, or access to alcohol. Look around where you are and how you live right now and see if you can pick out what your fears are. If you are thinking about living on a boat, this is the place to start. Living on a boat is like the backpack, there is only so much room and nowhere to hide from all the stuff I think I need/am afraid of and it gets heavy and cumbersome fast. The pressure for discernment becomes great. The hike, the boat, the dog with the squeaky toy, they are opportunities to reveal the path to our heart, the part of us that makes life worth really living. But first there is definitely serious irritation and sifting.
Living on a boat is filled with of little discomforts. I do not have a flushing toilet. I do not have hot water, so all dishes are washed cold, like when you go camping and rinse everything off and then make a mental note to rewash them when you get home, except that I am home and my foot powers the faucet. My sink is about the size of a two gallon jug, so only one plate, a spoon and a cup represent a “pile” that make the sink (where I also need to brush my teeth) unusable. I do not have a shower, for me or the dogs- one of whom is fairly incontinent, mind you. I do not have a washing machine, laundry hamper, closet, or obvious location to put jewelry, mail, papers,shoes, coats, or even drying dishes. I do not have a junk drawer. Then there are all the other normal things I don’t have, like a couch, TV, internet, guest room, mailbox, garage, front door, clothes I *might* wear someday, or a yard.
I do have to empty a very expensive glorified pee bucket regularly. If I don’t, it will overflow onto my floor which really does challenge my mental stability. I have three cups, one spoon, three forks, two plates, and one butter knife. I have a tiny refrigerator (oh, pu-leez,) and a two burner stove top and oven that run on propane that I have to refill at a gas station when it is empty. I have a small heater that if I try to turn off in the middle of the night and touch the wrong side, will burn me and certainly could catch fire. I have a full closet of lady clothes, workout clothes and play/covered in paint clothes, though I do not have an actual closet, but because unlike many of the other boat people I know, I need all the costuming that comes with working in the city and cannot subsist on two pairs of khakis and a windbreaker.
I have a quarter berth to sleep on (think about 1/2 size of a twin) because I hated contorting to weird angles every time I needed to get out of the V berth. I have four two-prong electrical outlets that run on shore power, as well as two 12v outlets for charging various batteries and devices when I am on the water. I have two marine batteries that last me about three days at sea. When I get up in the middle of the night to take the dog out and have to scramble up the stairs and over the side of the boat without my contacts in, I say a prayer both before and after because one of these days I am going to misjudge the step or wet toe rail or whatever and one or both of us either die or end up in the water. My “trash can” is a dog poop bag.
These are all small material problems compared to my self-imposed limits: Safety, warmth, and avoiding death. They seem so simple and normal that I skipped over them and went after all the marketing temptations that were supposed to get rids of the squeaks. A house, cars, travel, drugs, alcohol, french silk dresses etc. I’ve tried it all. The squeaks continued. They were all distractions that kept me from focusing on what I was really up against. The more I have gotten rid of, the more clear I have become about what really holds me back. My need for being warm enough keeps me trapped below the 38th parallel. My need for “safety” is in my face constantly in a chaotic city. They both squeak at me constantly. Living on a boat is my make my other distractions smaller so that I can get to the real work of making my mind, and therefore my world, much larger.
Living here has helped me enormously in getting clearer about what I actually need and what was just noise. I’ve lost the distracting squeaking of a house that says it is missing something and I can buy my way out of it. The importance of this cannot be understated. Living on the boat has loosened my attachment to *my* things. Instead of seeing things as pleasant or helpful, I find them burdensome and cluttering. Whatever my life needs, I am no longer confused that it is better furniture, new clothing, or a pumpkin latte. Living in a house was dreadfully confusing that way. I think of this as consumerist deprogramming and I need it. That trap is endless. Starter home, real home, second home, vacation home, more money, more time….mend my life!
And when my mind goes, “squeak squeak squeak” I am learning that it is my mental stability and flexibility that are being tested, of how much I really want it-psychic freedom-not that I need an accent lamp. I am learning how to climb the stairs of my enormous psychic house but first I had to get rid of all the junk. Pumpkin spice lattes, half baths and plumbing have been thrown by the wayside to make room for the stuff that does actually scare me and keep my life dull and distracted so I can get to that really good stuff that makes my heart swell and spill over.
A few weeks ago my 13 year old disabled dog stopped breathing in his sleep and I was terrorized. Thought stopped, time stopped. It all stopped. I was fully there to feel every excruciating moment of it. Out of habit, my mind raced to think of who or what could save me from the moment- my friend, the vet, my mom, someone, something. He. Wasn’t. Breathing. I didn’t want to bear it. I wasn’t even sure I could. I tried to wake him, move him, snap him out of it but his soft, limp body barely responded. Trapped in 100 square feet, in the dark, there was nowhere to go physically or psychically.
In those horror-filled moments, most of my mind was occupied with coming up with some kind of fix. An accommodation, solution, some way to mend this terrible nightmare. But from my heart, a realization emerged that I have earned through working with my fears and learning to tolerate millions of tiny discomforts. Being “present” isn’t sitting in a cozy room with a hot cup of tea and just the right throw over the couch, it’s that horrifying realization that here, this moment right now, is all there is. And trapped in that moment, terrified my heart said, “We are here, together, and he is loved. If he goes out cradled in my arms at the end of another great day I will be brave and break wide open.” This, my friends, is what living on a boat has actually meant- that I have enough freedom to do the heart work I need to do so that I can be fully in the joy and heartbreak of my life. He did not die that night but someday he will and so will I. The space in between is mine to confront or avoid as I choose. And on this tiny boat, I am choosing to be brave.
I am grateful for the space I have now to feel my life as it is happening. From here, plumbing seems like small potatoes. I want to know who am I am, and for me, this little space is as much about what it isn’t as what it is. It is a little boat with little discomforts. It isn’t a major distraction. What I can forego is an opening. It’s the boredom of free time that opens me up to all the wonder and terror that is already there.
