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 my short skirts and shorts for all the bruises, some in some of the strangest places. I still take it as a given that any time I am on the deck for more than ten minutes I am probably going to come away with a bruise and an all day sail guarantees that I won’t have any fingernails by the end of it. Just washing the boat can feel like I am taking my life into my hands. There was the very bloody ER visit a few months ago just getting on the boat, and of course the time that I was on a friend’s Dana and an accidental jibe had us both back at the dock, him reading aloud about the survival rate of boom injuries and me with a jar of olives pressed against a three inch high lump on my head, both of us waiting to see if I was going to die. Learning to let pain happen is how I have learned to think more quickly and clearly. Now, I can just keep going. I consciously try to focus my attention on pain when I experience it so as to try and get a real experience, as opposed to the mind experience of pain = bad. But pain is a relatively small problem compared to fear.

Fear is the least talked about feeling out there. Oh yes, there is plenty about overcoming fear, but that is not really telling us about fear itself as a signal and body experience. Preparing for the transpac last year was just a year long exercise in working with fears. All ten million of them. Trying to imagine floating on a piece of plastic with three miles of water below is a real roller coaster for the old nervous system. Just imagining sinking that far would turn my blood cold. I would watch Crash Test Boat as a way to self soothe, imagining all the ways I could save my life with a potato as I drifted off to sleep. Even just being out on the bay at night is terrifying. With up to four knot currents and water at about 55 degrees, chances of rescue and recovery would be fairly slim even close to shore. With the dogs on board, even fairly mild conditions cause me to run through terrifying scenarios. The thinking is the scariest part. I have had enough near death experiences to know that when things get that bad, a kind of calm sets in. And paradoxically, the safer I am, like lying in a warm bed on dry land, can be some of when I feel the most afraid, imaging that little boat on the big ocean.

But if grief is the companion of joy, fear is probably the companion of agency or freedom. Inside, we kind of all know what we need to do and the doing it is how we stay connected to our vital energy. We may have to risk our lives to really life. This  uneasy bargain that may seem dramatic, but having been on land for the last few years and in basically complete safety (and bruise-free), I can say that the danger, pain, fear, and risk to life I took on the boat was worth happiness and aliveness I felt then. I can’t separate the time on the water from the joy of the dogs or the freedom in our little lives, but I can say that safety and security are part of a deadness that, if I am being honest, I truly hate.