Leaves, snow, and daffodil sprouts
Warming up my desk and other discombobulations in this new year
The little patch of earth outside my house is full of fall, winter, and spring.
I am having the darndest time getting down to business, and it seems the weather is with me in this. Are we composting? Resting? Sending down new roots, stretching new sprouts?
One of the most difficult parts of adjusting to land has been shifting my relationship with time. At sea, I was synced to my internal rhythms, crew morale, global weather systems, and the local winds and tides. Here on land, I’m linked to Google Calendar and email addresses and my cell phone and my housemates and others of kin and community. It’s….a lot. And it seems like it’s a lot for a lot of us.
I have compared this transition to merging onto a highway while riding a bicycle, hearing my fellow motorists holler out the window, “I can’t keep up!”.
When I express that I feel more difficulty adjusting to my home culture than those elsewhere on this continent, I hear more “me toos” than how-tos. I also see a lot of shrugs and living outside of means, myself included at times.
Most of the people I socialized with along our sailing route were retirees or travelers, having made their contribution to the world or in the absence of that, deciding to take a bit of a walkabout like us. Many had looked at the climate data, the rising cost of living, or simply the prospect of sitting at a desk all day and lept into the loophole of living on a sailboat. Note: a US, EU, or other “Western” passport seems to be a requirement for that style of life, allowing us to show up unannounced at a border and enter, simply because it suits us.
I feel I’m losing the thread here, and also that finally some of the urgent things I feel I need to say are coming through. Bear with me?
One usual framework in this swirl of modern life has always been my speed limits.
I have gravitated toward activities that have a set, slow pace since I was a kiddo. Knitting, hand stitching, swimming, and a walk around the neighborhood with Mom.
In recent years, I picked up new activities with complex, yet straightforward speed limits, like sailing, fermentation, and construction projects. I love the inability to skip a stitch or a step. There’s a limit on how quickly I can knit a sweater, stitch a rug, or sail from point A to point B. These days there’s so much talk about AI and other innovations, speeding us faster and faster. I understand that technology plays a key role in raising the standards of living for all, but the joy I’ve witnessed in communities in Africa, Central America, and Asia has me more skeptical about the ever-increasing need to speed up.
Growing up six degrees north and eight degrees west of my current home, there was a limit on how quickly we could move to spring from winter and a comfort in tucking into a deeper, colder darkness. There’s also a good chance I’m romanticizing the winter from my temperate location and a recent voyage through the tropics. There’s also probably a benefit to wading into seasons slowly after thirteen years of subtler shifts in lower latitudes.
Scientists are in agreement that the climate is changing, and depending on expertise, 91-100% agree that it’s us humans who have caused it. Lifestyle changes are being made, but not rapidly enough, to stave off the worst impacts. The electric grid is our biggest emitter and only homeowners can make a straightforward shift in supply. Severe weather events are in the news weekly and it would be good for us all to consider what would happen if we missed five minutes, five hours, five days, five weeks, or five months of the steady stream of water, electricity, Wi-Fi, and other supply chains that deliver convenience at an astonishing pace to our screens, doorsteps, and communities. What are we giving up or using up for all of that?
Sometimes people express well-intentioned and good-hearted concern for how communities with fewer advantages or resources will weather these forecasted storms. What I have seen from living in remote island communities, and from living on a sailboat, is that we could learn a tremendous amount from those who grew up connected to the environment and the resources we need to survive. In my current communities, I often see a greater focus on acquiring the right tool for the job, than just making it work with what’s on hand.
I am by no means suggesting that we bury our heads in the sand and say nothing of injustice in faraway places. I am suggesting that we look around at the problems that are closer to hand, and perhaps easier to begin untangling for no reason other than location and timing. I hear folks already bracing for this election year in the US, and I’m looking for ways to strengthen ties across differences, rather than fall for the traps of an increasingly divided society.
I often hear my peers get overwhelmed by the bag we’ve handed from previous generations on carbon emissions, income inequality, and what have you, but my walks around Hollywood Cemetary have revealed that all times have their challenges, and besides that, we only have now. What a gift that could be to ourselves if we shared it with others.
The dead leaves, melting snow, and oddly timed, but beautiful daffodil sprouts have spun me around this week. I want to be steadied by the seasons like I was with the major wind patterns along our voyage from San Francisco to the Chesapeake, but it seems the temperate climate is squirrelier than that these days. I would like someone to tell me the next step or how to get by, but for that, I’ll need to cultivate my inner knowing, experiment, and maybe just live.
I’ve been hung up on how difficult our journey was, and how deep we had to dig sometimes to find a way forward, but I have recently come to realize that it was our softness and silliness that saw us through.
I am beginning to thaw out from the isolation of our journey, beginning to feel safe to be myself in front of others again, and not just from the safety of this keyboard and newsletter. Last night, five friends sat in our office/craft room and worked on different projects, simply because it was fun. My focus in the last couple of weeks has been to try softer, rather than harder, to simply show up and see what we can do together.
Good luck as you figure all this out. I won't go into all the details, but between 25 and 35 years of age, -I was a mess! If you ever want to hear the details-PM me.
Great to see your beautiful writing again! You might enjoy a book I just read, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. It's kind of an anti-time-management manual whose main message is that life is short and we can't possibly do everything we want to do or feel we should do, so we should acknowledge that, relax, and prioritize the stuff that really matters to us. Also, it's not a long book! ;-)