Back in the water

 

This morning as I woke, it dawned on me that our lives have essentially changed rather permanently thanks to the pandemic. Sure, we lived through it, its not like we were sleepwalking, but I think it takes some time for reality to actually sink in, you know what I mean?

I mean...my husband used to be a Pilot. Sure, technically, he literally still is a Pilot, someone with the skills necessary to be able to fly a plane, but he is not flying right now and may never fly again. That, once you really think about it, its just so tough to get ones head around. This sense of purpose, this concept of identity, for so long, it was wrapped up in flying...and suddenly, that simply isn't so any more. 

For three years, I woke early, I worked in a kitchen, I ran errands, I did accounting, I created dishes and compiled menus, I did all the stock taking and ordering, I negotiated with suppliers, I trained staff and ran myself ragged...and then suddenly, I wasn't that person any more...and I am not sure if I will ever be that person again. 

I woke in the arms of my husband, in our slightly too small cabin on our slightly too hard mattress with our doors clipped open because one of the door handles broke a while back and I was suddenly aware of how our lives hadn't just changed in that we had lost this sense of identity, our place in society, but how we'd lost our sense of belonging, our sense of roots, our sense of home, our proximity to our families...and how we'd given up our privacy and in many ways, our sense of personhood, as we learn to live this all-inclusive, 24/7 life with our children as they grow into young adulthood. 

That immense sense of loss, of feeling adrift, it weighed down on me so heavy that I felt the tears well up in my eyes and I had to pause and take a deep breath so I wouldn't break down further.

Our relationship will change in the years to come, and I am confident we will be able to grow into it, but right now, it all feels a bit raw to me. I feel like I am suddenly at a stage in my life where I am becoming my parents...the responsibility of our children and their future, a constant in our waking hours and beyond, suddenly at the forefront of my consciousness. Before this new chapter in my life, parenthood was just one facet of who I was, and now...it feels like this is everything that I am. I know many people live their lives this way, but this is new to me and it is taking some time for me to get used to this new version of personhood.

I miss having my own time, and I assume my husband must miss his too, maybe I am just assuming this purely so I don't feel guilty for feeling this way. I recall my business partner saying something along the lines of, "I don't know if you will survive a life on the seas, you are such a social person, you'd go mad with no one to socialize with." Truth be told...I am actually a closet introvert. People are a wonderful distraction, but they can exhaust as well. I crave time alone, more than I crave the company of a multitude of strangers or even friends. I crave uninterrupted solitude. I miss going to the movies alone. I miss being able to go for a meal alone. It sounds ludicrous, but these little things that many solitary loners dread is what I find I crave. I am grateful I am fortunate enough that this is all that I crave, I mean, it could be a lot worse.

So the day in-day out of the loving yet sometimes cloying engagement with two growing young children in an ocean-bound home that is never in one place for long, sometimes all I want is to shut it all out and read a book. I am sure my husband feels the same way too, sometimes, at least I hope he does, just so I am not inhuman for feeling this guilty need to be left to my own devices. 

My husband is constantly busy, if he isn't plotting new journeys he's pumping out the bilge or trying to fix the head or filling the tanks or thinking up some new task to keep himself equally busy. I watch him as he flits from one task to another and I wish nothing more for him than to just take some time to himself, go sit down in a place of quiet and do some reading or selfishly watch a movie alone. Maybe this is my wish for him because that is what I wish for myself! 

The kids have taken to this life as if they were born for it! I am almost speechless how quickly they have adapted. Isn't it beautiful? To be that young and capable of changing your approach to life, having no expectations and hence being more willing to go with the flow. As adults, we become so set in our ways, we have unrealistic expectations of ourselves and others...and change, no matter how welcome, is still not easy. 

I realize this now as what I am struggling with. I love the beauty all around me. I love waking up on the water, hearing the gentle slaps of the waves against the hull of the boat which doubles as our bedroom walls. I love knowing my children are now confident and secure enough to have asked for a cabin at the opposite end of the boat so they can have their own space and privacy, despite starting this journey in a cabin adjacent to us. They have become more communicative, willing to adapt and eager to help us than we could have ever expected them to be if we were still living our life in the bustling metropolis of Hong Kong. 

I can see sometimes that my husband is exhausted, so many jobs needing doing and really only him with the technical knowledge to get them done. We both end up collapsing into our little cabin each day end with little more to give than a sigh of relief. He complains of back spasms and sore muscles, I have my own complaints about aching knees and lower back pain. Heavy ropes to haul, issues with the windlass, heavy chain to shift, one thing after another, causing both of us to use muscles we have not trained in over a year. 

I keep saying, "That is it! Tomorrow, we need to stretch! Tomorrow, we need to bust out the TRX and get some exercise in that will prepare us for the genuinely hard work of sailing a yacht!" and much like the Spanish or the Tamil concept of "Tomorrow"...it never comes! I could laugh until I cried, but this is how it is right now. I keep thinking that I will get to it, but I don't know where the time goes, honestly. It feels like every day is a holiday, even though we are working hard daily on the boat, working on meal prep, service and clean up, even though we have started home-schooling andensure to keep the boat looking clean and liveable...I am waiting for the day it doesn't feel like we are on a holiday that never ends...and somehow, much like the "Tomorrow" I speak of, it may never come. 

Is that such a bad thing? Even as we adjust to all the things we are trying to get done in one day, it still feels like a holiday...

Maybe that is the one thing we have going for us. This feeling of being on a holiday, where work is not really work and where keeping busy is just that, keeping busy, without anyone to report to or to gauge your progress or commend you on how well you have done. Maybe somewhere along the expanse of time that stretches ahead of us I will give up the guilt I feel when I take some time away from the rest of the household so I can read a book or listen to music in solitude. Its really no ones fault, its just in my hard-wiring. There is a sense of over-achieving, to cram so much into one day, to want to be perfect at everything, and this is where the guilt lies. Wanting to be perfect at home-schooling, wanting to be perfect at boat fixing, wanting to be perfect at meal prep, wanting to be perfect at keeping a spotlessly clean living space, it can be exhausting if I weren't in some way becoming mindful of this aspect of how I operate.

I feel guilty for being where I am, because I am sure many people wish they had this opportunity. I feel guilty for wanting some time on my own, because for what its worth, I have so much more than just empty solitude. I feel guilty for not always being content or happy, but isn't that a good thing? Maybe I am becoming more mindful about how guilt doesn't serve me. Maybe I need to just give myself some space to feel what I feel and know that there is no good or bad about feeling the way I do, that all there is...simply is to let the feelings be felt. 

We are in Portugal at the moment. The mornings always kick off with mist and condensation on every window and by noon its brilliantly sunny and hot. The Pandemic continues to rage as people go about their day to day lives. As we walk along the promenade, we see people wearing masks as they sit in the sun, tanned men jogging shirtless, young teens on electric scooters as they whizz by and families with small children, all wearing masks, lounging beside a playground that has been cordoned off with police tape to ensure no child can play on the beautiful playground structures. Its sad and yet...its kinda beautiful to see people out, even as the fear of getting Covid-19 remains prevalent, in whatever variant the wave is coming inland with, because what else is there to do than to keep on living?

I was reading my book about Blue Spaces and one of the exercises in the book was about gratitude practice...to look out at the sea around me and to think of 10 things that I was grateful for that money couldn't buy. I asked my husband and Roman too, while he was still here on the boat with us, if they could think of ten things in their lives that they were grateful for that money couldn't buy...each had a hard time coming up with more than a handful. 

Sometimes you need a prompt. The author gave just such a prompt, "I am grateful for this space. I am grateful for the water...." and so on. The more I pondered the immense task of coming up with ten things I was grateful for, the more aware I became of how guilty I feel for being happy and sharing that feeling with others. I don't know if its just a matter of having an Asian upbringing and how somehow humility is important, I doubt that is the case as many times, Asians can also be quite boastful, proud and vain...so I think its purely that being happy isn't really something to boast about! Like, you may say someone looks well, but they will counter that its only because they are barely just recovering from a sickness that had them at deaths door! You can comment on someone having a beautiful dress, and the answer needs to be that it was bought on sale and you had actually wanted a completely different colour but settled for what you did. 

I don't know how to explain this where it makes sense...all I can say is that I grew up unable to take a compliment graciously. I also had a hard time being proud of my accomplishments, I always felt that I could have done better or somehow I would be discovered to have gotten away with something, like some kind of fraud. In much the same way, I guess even happiness and this feeling that I may well be experiencing it more often than I am not, that too feels like something I cannot share for fear it could diminish or evaporate like the morning mist. 

So if I take a long hard look at my life right now...I have all the me time I can want, I just feel guilty I have it and so I feel guilty if I take it, and this guilt makes me feel angry because I don't want to have to feel guilty...and no one is making me feel that way but me. 

I really need to let that guilt go...its OK to not be OK and so on and so forth...

Tomorrow we head to Porto so we can fix our shortlist of boat related problems. Our autopilot is still in need of fixing. We still haven't got our water maker working despite me jumping into the frigid waters to go poke away at the through holes to see if some sort of sea life was clogging the passage of water into the pumps on board. We need to fix something on our radar that essentially has our boat showing up as facing back to front and so when we travel, it shows us sailing in the right direction, but with the little icon showing we are essentially in reverse despite us sailing forwards! We need to replace intake pipes for the diesel tanks as they leak when the tanks overflow and we need to completely overhaul pipes for the heaters. 

What else? Ah, yes, the windlass...something is up with that, a piece missing means that we need to manually work on feeding the chain in or ensuring its edged out so it doesn't double up and get caught on there. The windlass motor also needs some seeing to, the mechanism seems to be alright with pulling the chain up but not with dropping it down, in order to drop anchor the only mechanism working is one in the cockpit and not the one near the windlass. All these issues are minor ones with major implications in the long run. The gear shifting mechanism in the outdoor cockpit somehow doesn't want to shift to neutral but its completely capable of doing so in the indoor steering cockpit. The drive shaft seems to be making a rattling noise while we are underway, so this will need to be looked at as well. And finally, the pump for the deck wash is somehow not connected to power...and hence, not working. 

Through it all, we have stayed calm and capable of talking through what needs doing, the long term implications of leaving it undone and ranking the things we need to have looked at in order of priority, a triage of terrors. 

Fortunately, we are in Portugal. And Porto, where we are headed, where we have called ahead, is the yachting capital of The Med, and work can be done on boats without difficulty in finding experts to do so and at a fraction of the price it would cost in the rest of the EU, so essentially, we are on the right track. 

Its been a phenomenally steep learning curve, realizing how little you can trust someone on their promises and how little choice you have in that process. If someone had promised you the repairs they did were sound and that they knew what they were doing, you simply believe them, what choice do you have? You wonder, why would they lie if they knew we were a family with two young kids who would be sailing around the world and our lives depended on everything working on the boat? Yeah, well...what can you do? If someone is gonna screw you, they will, you can't sit around being bitter about it, you can just learn to be more resourceful and figure shit out yourself, this would take time, sometimes time that you don't have or can ill afford. 

We will figure it all out. Catch us in three years time and we will know the ins and outs of Kokoro. Catch us in 10 years time and we may well be living on a weed farm in some far flung corner of the planet, peacefully making medicine and living an even simpler life! Who knows where our journey will take us, all I know is that we will be together. 

Nothing is more important than love and fresh air, and I've got to admit, that we have plenty of. So for now, I am going to end with 10 things I am grateful for that money can't buy: 

1. I am grateful for my beautiful children and how well they have adapted.
2. I am grateful for my parents being alive and well.
   
3. I am grateful for sunshine.
4. I am grateful for clean air.
5. I am grateful for the freedom to read again, after so many years of never having the time. 
6. I am grateful for the peaceful nights of sleep I have experienced this last week. 
7. I am grateful for my body that has been working hard with me as I learn new tasks and wander new lands. 
8. I am grateful for the wind that sings through the structures on our boat and through the open port holes. 
9. I am grateful for my soulmate, my husband, with whom I am finally experiencing that feeling of growing older together. 
10. I am grateful for how time is able to just pass without me being caught up in what time it is on a clock or what day it is on a calendar. 

There is much to learn, much to be grateful for, and much to let go of so I can stop feeling guilty for where I am, who I am or am not, and how I have no idea where I will be in a a year. Much to make peace with. Sigh. Yeah...we got this. 

I have got this.