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What could go wrong?
Things fail, crack, break, and rot on even great boats but jeez is it hard to avoid a grandiose attitude about your own boat. When I started reading sea stories and watching sailing videos, I had this voice in my mind that went something like, “Oh yeah, but that probably won’t happen to me” or “Yeah, but that could probably have been prevented” or “I’ll have this better boat where things like that won’t happen” and then, “well, once I get everything fixed then things like this won’t happen anymore.” Exceptionalism is as American as apple pie but it really didn’t serve me well to hang on to the idea…
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Fear, Pain, and Mortality. Part of the fun of boats
Positivity has gotten to a nearly pathological level in mainstream culture. As a therapist, one of the hardest things I do is to try and convince very nice people that it is okay to be angry, disappointed, afraid, and resentful and my patients don’t need to immediately make themselves feel “compassion” for people that have hurt them. They are without fail quite skeptical, but I press ahead because I am confident that is true and part of that confidence has come from learning to work with fear, pain, and mortality on this boat. The boat is a near constant exercise in pain. Learning to sail meant learning to throw out…
