Everything we had to leave behind
Today's blog will take you through the last few ports we've been to, all the way up to where we are headed. I will start this journey with Faro, Portugal...
As we motored in towards Faro, I was already in awe of how stunning and unique this port is compared to the last several ports we encountered in The Algarve. Our last port of call was Portimão which was a great anchorage, stable, but there was a lot of partying tourists around and the thumping bass of dance music would be carried across the water late into the night.
The other bummer, and genuinely, a real danger, is that you get many speed boats that decide to tie up not far from anchored sailboats, without an anchor, about four of them side by side, everyone drinking their beers like there is no tomorrow and then hopping on to their Jet Skis that they brought along!
Not sure what it is about people who ride jet skis but they sure seem to crave an audience! They swerve closer and closer to anchored sailboats, while the owners, much like us, stand on deck watching on nervously knowing full well these fools have no insurance that can cover the kind of damage they can wreck on our hull!
No bueno! Jesus, just glad we moved on. We were in Lagos long enough, a week in total, and that was an expensive marina, but the work we had them do on the boat was also surprisingly expensive, so anchoring is going to have to be the saving grace for balancing the budget, which at this stage is looking like a lot of days of pasta.
I will be honest, we have not actually been doing much in the way of accounting, and for sure, at some point, we are going to just stop and go through all the various bank account balances, something people don't stress about when there is this feeling of plenty, but I grew up with a mother who was always in this zone of "there is not enough" and that anxiety resides within me to this day.
My mother is Japanese, she grew up in Kobe, which is part of the Kansai Area. My grandfather was in the war, so his gambling habit, likely a coping strategy for PTSD that was never acknowledged back then, put his family in a terrible fix, so the financial ruin of gambling is something that likely created the running anxiety my mother always had when it came to money and its what was unwittingly passed down to me as well. I swing wildly between the way my mother thinks and the way my father does, its like two opposing poles because my father is someone who grew up with nothing and made himself into something, so he's like the opposite of my mother!
My father thinks that as long as he is able to work, there will always be a constant flow of money in, so money in allows for money to go out. Dad was always helping anyone and everyone, something much to the chagrin of my Mum. Lets just say that Dad will always be remembered for his generosity, even by his own children, but in many ways, he never fully had this anxiety about money because he always lived with this zen mindset of plenty. Everything he had in life was plenty more than he grew up with. The shoes on his feet, he never skimped or bought cheap shoes...the clothes he loved to buy, he never really skimped there either, in fact if my mother was a shoe fiend capable of rivalling Imelda Marcos, my father had the same issue with clothes! He just loved nice clothes, lol.
Anyway...the unlearning of everything we have lived, its tough. I have oscillated between drought and plenty all my life. When I had a job in finance, I would get quarterly bonuses. These bonuses were oftentimes more than my monthly salary, so I would then use that money to save some for taxes and then I would buy Jake (my eldest) whatever toy he wanted within a budget, generally I would give him a number and he would work with that, Toys R Us catalogue in hand, he'd walk through the whole store. I would also, without fail, give my helper, Anna, a bonus from what I got.
The money Anna got was always coming at a time when she didn't expect it and when she genuinely needed it, you know what that feels like to be a part of? It feels pretty good. So yeah, somehow, money, it never had a legit value in the eyes of my Dad, and sometimes I worry that it is much the same to me, like...this bizarre number on a screen, except now that number kinds keeps slowly dipping lower coz there is no money coming in! That seems to be where my Mum's anxiety kicks in within me, like, dammit, she used to get so mad at me when I would quit a job because I hated it.
She'd always yell, "Never! Never quit a job before you have another one lined up!!!"
Yeah...I never listened. I was likely her most troublesome child, really. My poor mother! I would quit jobs because I was underworked. I would quit jobs because they didn't treat staff right. I would quit jobs because I hated the management. I once quit a job because they refused my colleague health insurance after they promised her they would give it to her once she'd worked there a year...the story goes, she found out she had breast cancer...but she didn't have insurance, and it was coming up on the one year when she was going to be given the promised insurance from the company we were working for. Her doctor, a decent human, said he would hold off on giving the diagnosis until she had her insurance, so she went to work, told them about this and was hoping for them to sort it all out...but then they said they couldn't do it for her now, knowing that her cancer could likely increase their premiums next time!
You know what I am talking about? Outrage!
Some people are just evil!
Yeah, I quit that job, but not before I gave a lengthy, scathing speech, with angry tears, at the daily morning meeting, calling them out for being scum. I was 18 years old at the time, working three jobs while living and going to school in the US.
I've worked so many different jobs, most of which I had no idea what I was doing when I first started, but I always did them well...and the older I got, the more willing I was to stick with something longer than a year or two because I was more invested in the team or I realized that nothing is perfect, not even me. That all said, likely the longest I have held a job has been something like three or four years. I have always been nomadic, even in my skill acquiring. Once I had learned everything there was to learn, no amount of money would keep me there. If there was no upward mobility, I was out.
Jeroen is the longest relationship I have ever been in. In many ways, I had to learn to love myself before I was ready for someone like him. It takes feeling secure in your own worth for you to understand the security you feel with someone else. I think I am the longest relationship he's ever had as well. He's a lot more stable on the work front, held jobs for years, even over a decade with Cathay Dragon...so in many ways he's like the Yin to my Yang. He is more conservative about a lot of things in life and I am more "fly by the seat of my pants".
As we navigate the new world of un-schooling, trying not to focus on everything we had left behind, I find him more willing to take risks and I am becoming more conservative, but I am thinking this could just be us balancing each other out, who knows. I am proud of how we are managing this life though. I have days when I feel pretty damn suicidal and I know it is purely because of Perimenopause. I can speak of this because I want to remove the stigma associated with the complete and utter living hell that is the decades long trudge towards menopause.
So many people, when I say I feel depressed, they are like, "What? Why are you depressed? What is bothering you?"
Nothing and everything. How do you explain the twisted world of hormonal decline?
If I was any good at illustrating, I would show me below the water with a big ol' anchor round my feet! Sadly, my drawing would be this little stick figure with an equally crappy anchor and a possible comical look of surprise on its face!
I miss having access to legal cannabis. Holland was great for that. Cannabis just takes the edge off the moods and just makes you feel like you can manage all the shit you have to manage. Alcohol is a central nervous system depressant, and although for many years I leaned on it as I self-medicated for depression, I am almost entirely avoiding it now because I no longer feel the urge to get shit-faced. That is huge progress, honestly, its taken me this long to actually know better, and thankfully, I am practically allergic to it now, not worth the suffering. While we sail the world, I am doing my best to stay calm but I am not always the epitome of mindfulness. As we rolled through the kids first Assignment from Wolsley Hall Oxford, their homeschooling program, I found myself practically foaming at the mouth mad because I have two beautiful sons with clear Attention Deficit Disorder, shit handwriting, mouthiness for days and subzero will to learn! They say anger is a clear sign that you care...apparently I care a lot! So does my husband! We just care a lot about those we love!
As an Asian who grew up with a Tiger Mom, I feel like I now understand why my mother shunted us off to tutors, she was not ready to have blood on her hands! I recall one time my mother trying to teach my sister & I maths and she was literally screaming, "How could I have given birth to such stupid children???" Yeah...that is the kind of parenting that psychologists tell us now that we are not supposed to do lest we permanently damage our kids...but hey, I totally get where my Mom was coming from!
They say that we are our own worst enemies. That little voice in your head, that super critical voice, its the voice of your own parent when you were little. Constantly reminding you, you aren't working hard enough, you aren't good enough, and you know you so desperately want to quit because you are always a quitter...
Nah, I am not going to quit. I want to...but I won't...not merely coz I can't, but I won't give up on myself being better at teaching my kids. I am not going to blame myself for them being 8 & 9 and not knowing that the world is full of aptitude tests to somehow gauge how intelligent or attentive you are, that the world is set up for you to somehow feel like a failure, that your ability to read & write are a greater indicator of success in life than your ability to add, subtract, multiply or divide.
Sigh...how do I stop feeling like a failure because I am tacking all my self-worth on to how my children are doing in their home schooling? Maybe this is just part of being a parent? Is it just me? Am I somehow defective? How the hell do I stop this voice in my head from answering all these questions in a very pessimistic manner?
Each assignment took the greater part of a day, there were tears, there was a lot of asking what the meaning of things were and there was a lot of frustration on both sides of the worktable...but we go it done. After handing the assignments in, we set sail, an 8 hour sail from Faro to Huelva and because we were keen to just keep on trucking vs studying (hey, at least I am being honest here!) we stayed just one night there on anchorage before we headed another 8 hours to Cadiz.
Cadiz is a beautiful city as well, we refuelled as soon as we arrived, a precision timing decision that we have had to learn from our mistakes. In the past we have been so desperate to get to our mooring that we've said we will refuel the day after, but then most pumping stations are not open when you wish to leave at the crack of dawn. This time, we knew better. For what its worth, fuel is cheap in Spain, and we are getting pretty damn good at tying up at random docks with just me springing off the boat onto the deck and the kids throwing me the ropes! I am the one who sets up the fenders and the ropes, and I do it all like clockwork. Does my husband wish I tied the ropes the way he would have done it? Sure! That said, he's the one who is also not going to be happy with my being behind the wheel, so its the lesser of two evils, and that is what he has to live with!
You know what? I actually have to sit with a glass to the tank and my ear on the underside of the glass, physically listening to the tank fill because the fuel gauges are shit. I listen while the fuel is pumped into the tank and when I feel I can hear it reaching the top of the tank, I yell out to stop! I also drum on the side of the tanks, this needs various hatches opened up and me reaching in to drum on the outer wall to hear how full it sounds. Its old school, but its effective! Jeroen is outside putting fuel in the tanks, I am inside as the human gauge of how full the tank is! I need a stethoscope!
We are only taking on as much fuel as we think we need because the problem with our fuel tanks will require a full on overhaul of opening up all the floorboards and having someone look at each individual tank. You see, we have 3 fuel tanks, lets call them Tank 1, Tank 2, and Tank 3. In the past, we made the mistake of thinking that the input for each tank was actually the wrong way around...think of your car, you have a place you put the fuel pump nozzle in, right? Well, imagine you have three of these...you may assume the one on the left is 1, and then 2 and 3 by the time you go right, right? Well, it was all wrong, turns out it was the other way around, the nozzle on the far left was for tank 3, and we ended up with issues of overfilling tanks to the point of diesel spraying or leaking out of tanks through sheer pressure on ageing pipes into the bilge.
Now that is a clean up you just do not look forward to. It involves a lot of eco friendly detergent to break down the fat globules, then a hand pump to pull it all out, then you need to put it into holding containers before disposing of it appropriately. Its a pain in the ass! So now, we have figured out that Tank 1 and Tank 3 are actual fuel tanks and Tank 2, which we also assumed was a fuel tank, is nothing more than a tank for the heating system during winter. Did you know diesel has an expiry date? You don't want to keep it sitting in a tank unused forever...it begins to degrade...and the other thing is also that diesel in a tank, you don't want too little of it in a tank either, condensation can form in there and then the water can provide a great place for bacteria to grow in and that could also damage your diesel. So Jeroen has been unscrewing the observation hatch on Tank 2, pumping diesel out that tank and then pumping that into the other two tanks, its a slow process and he does this every other journey, so that each time we have a rough estimate of how many 20 litre jerry cans we have put into each tank that we run the engine on!
Hey, the fuel gauges don't really work, and in order to ensure that we recalibrate the gauges we need to start with empty tanks, then fill them up a bit, then a bit more...you get the picture, we have not been able to get to that stage, that will have to happen after we stop and maybe take Kokoro out the water for a bit over the winter break. We will winter in Sicily, probably get there by end October and then just stick around there until March or so. I hope to take part of March to make a solo trip to Spain, by plane, and then to walk a good chunk of El Camino de Santiago, depending on how this pandemic is going to be rolling on by then.
Whatever I have learned about engines or diesel has been purely from dealing with this boat! I have learned the difference between the way fuel combusts in a diesel engine vs a petrol engine, and this has been because I actually began to read (note, didn't say I finished it!) a book on How Boats Work which literally started with all this fuel injection, pistons and return valve diagrams! Its all pretty cool, but I find that doing the homeschooling is enough schooling for me in a day, and I literally need to decompress from that on the daily! So even my knot tying book remains sadly untouched because I would prefer to read books that make me chill out or watch something that takes me completely out of this reality and into another.
Will it get easier? I sure hope so! I am sure it will get more second nature for the kids as well, the longer they do this on the daily. Their assignment scores came back and they did really well on Maths, in the 90's...so that would be an A and they scored in the 80's for their English, a solid B...and something like the 90's for their Sciences as well...another A.
We try to offset their hard work days with time off at the beach, if there is a beach to be had. They get to just be boys, dig holes, play games in the sand, get dirty.
In reality, its hard for all of us to get used to this home schooling aspect of our lives, at this stage it feels like it takes over our lives, and it sometimes feel like we just want to get off the train but can't...but then we just have to remind ourselves about the Buddhist concept of impermanence...well, I have to remind myself!
None of this is going to last forever! Well, technically it will last at least another decade or so, but its not always going to be this hard. The kids aren't always going to need this much hand-holding. At some point their hunger for knowledge will overtake their resistance to sitting still. At some point their willingness to sit with their discomfort will become manageable and they will find themselves willing learners.
While in Portimão, we took the kids on an afternoon jaunt to The Chapel of Bones. You know what? I am gonna just put this out there, don't go following peoples advice on where to go from guide books or random tourist info blogs! This chapel was touted as one of those "must see" things in The Algarve. Must see that still involved a 30 minute Uber ride that then cost triple the price to get back from the middle of nowhere chapel.
Me, personally, I would prefer to be cremated, I think its more sensible. You don't take up more space on earth, sure, you may add to the carbon that goes out into the atmosphere, but it would be a damn sight less carbon you'd add than if you remained alive! I would have no issue with just being cremated and someone dumping my ashes at the base of an olive tree or some such. You know, it takes generations for an olive tree to bare fruit. I remember that from watching 1 Giant Leap, their very first audio visual album that was pretty ground breaking back then, look them up if you have time, or I will post one of their videos here for some point of reference.
Anyway, in that video, some dude talks about the concept that it takes generations for an olive tree to bear fruit...and that a grandfather is planting an olive tree so that his grandchildren can harvest the fruit. Its this sort of long, forward, future minded thinking that we are lacking in this day and age sometimes. In this age of consuming without end. In this age of being consumers and being consumed by everything that we are exposed to.
So yeah, me, I wouldn't mind being the fertilizing ashes for an olive tree...maybe some of my goodness can nourish the tree and from there a part of me lives on in the leaves to look up at the sun each day and then give forth life saving oxygen into the world...
Being buried in the ground, left to rot for a while, apparently it does take a while, it doesn't appeal to me...not that it would matter, coz I'd be dead, but one does have to wonder if being part of an altar piece was what these bones had in mind when still covered in flesh...well, that was what went through my mind while I gazed upon The Chapel of Bones. The chapel is composed of the bones of monks whose bodies were exhumed to make way for the next round of dead people to be buried in the same plot. You know, back then, they would exhume remains every decade or so and just repurpose the plot for the next round of dead people!
Its a practical solution to a very real problem, space is a commodity these days. I believe my father just wants to be dumped at sea, which I think is totally illegal, you can't just dump a dead person into the ocean, although I am sure many have done so without getting caught! My mother wants to be cremated, and then her bones are to be put in some sort of bone crushing, cement mixer type machine with little iron ball bearings, so they can be ground down to a fine powder before we store them in an urn. Funny thing is, Mum is a Christian, a Protestant, a convert from a young age...but I think she wants to die a Buddhist. All I keep freaking out about is the bit where she says we have to pick up her bones from the crematory pyre with chopsticks! I remember when we were kids we were told never to pass food from chopstick to chopstick, you know, like you do when you want to pass on that piece of whatever you don't want to eat on to your sibling who is so keen, because apparently that is how they do things with the bones of the dead!
I don't know...there were a lot of things my Mum said we can and can't do because it was bad luck or something worse, and I am not sure where it comes from, whether its Indian superstition or Japanese...no matter what, I still to this day have an issue with walking over someone's outstretched legs even if I don't care about walking under a ladder! To hear her get all mad, "You want me to die???" all because we walked over her legs as she sat on the floor with her legs outstretched. We'd have to cross back over to undo the death wish!
You may laugh, and I sometimes do too, but back then it really would freak a kid out!
"Always say goodbye before you leave the house!" she'd yell. If you left without saying goodbye, you'd be yelled back inside and told the why, "If you got hit by a bus while crossing the road, that would have been the last time!"
I believe its known as Stoicism? Most of my Mums concerns came from life and death.
Hmmm...
Yeah, I will take Stoicism for 100 points!
Anyway, apart from taking our kids to this Chapel of Bones, which they didn't find so creepy but which they rated a solid 5/10 for awe inspiring yet not worth the journey, the one good thing they did get to enjoy was the natural beauty of The Benagil Caves located further down the coast from Faro.
Now that was worth the write up.
We were not ready to pay to go see it, but we did take the time to wake super early, stop, anchor, and motor the tender out to the cave. It was stunning, as the photo above will prove. The coastline of The Algarve is beaten senseless by the Atlantic and the winds that come that way, and its all fossil rich limestone that is clearly layer upon layer of time. The cave was enormous and we were fortunate enough to get there before the throngs of tour groups begin their pilgrimage from about 9am in the morning.
Once we'd checked this off our list, we headed out to Huelva, knowing full well that we had not much further to go before we were almost in The Mediterranean. Huelva one night on anchor, then we did Cadiz, again a single night on anchor. In Cadiz we made sure to go in to the city, just to have a look-see and say we did our best not to miss out, and it was worth the effort.
The weather was stupendous, and the kids really have gotten great with walking without complaining, as have I, really.
We've had our share of things worth complaining about, but we have taken all of them in stride. Well, for one, the flush for the head at the rear of the boat stopped working! So when we tried to figure what it was, it involved a solid two days of work cutting wires and reattaching them before coming to accept it was actually a battery issue, the one battery we had not replaced!
Screw that! I think we are so done with spending money on something that isn't super urgent! The flush and the dump pump work while the engine is running, and so we use that head while underway, which is convenient as its easier to get to while the boat is in motion, but otherwise we use the head at the front, the one with a manual pump. We will replace the battery once we make it to the British side of Gibraltar, we expect it to be easier to source and the price to also be tax exempt.
You'd think we'd lose our shit with problems that drop in twos (pun intended) but we haven't...its life...a life without problems is not really an exciting life at all. Can you imagine a life where everything went perfect all the time? Like...nothing, absolutely nothing ever happens that you don't want to happen. Yeah, that is not how life is. Life is a series of putting out small fires, or at least its how it is on the boat. No actual fires, just metaphorical fires, but it feels like that is what life on a boat is like. I am confident that is what life was like when running a restaurant too, its just that I didn't see it that way at the time, every problem felt like the end of the world that I had to fight through.
The thing about buying a second hand anything, its only as good as the person who maintained it prior. Someone like my husband, he has always been super diligent with maintaining a boat. When we had the Lagoon 450F, he was switched on like no one could be! Much of the work he did was so he could learn but also so he could save money. By the time we sold it, the boat was valued at more than we would have expected, which was good for us. I reckon we would like to do the same with this boat. Really raise the value of the boat purely by putting in the hard work to restore it to good as gold.
Do we talk about buying another boat? Yeah, we do...but only because we dream of having a boat that we are the first to own and that we can build to our own specifications. There is a lot out there about how a custom build is not a great idea because then you have to find someone who wants to buy a boat built to your specifications, but honestly, we aren't talking about a crazy custom build from some small company, we are thinking more along the duo-hull line, established builders and just ensuring we don't have unnecessary shit built in that just creates space to collect more stuff. Things that drive us mad about the current build we are in has more to do with Jeroen being tall and whacking his head on every corner, and the damn stairs, there is just stuff that could do with doing away with or just changing purpose. It is what it is, we are working with what we've got, but hey, we do think of all the things we would do differently once given the chance.
Yeah, one day in the distant future, we will ensure we buy our forever boat...just give us some time to put our capital generation plans into gear. Until then, we just work on this here solid vessel. She's a beauty, she's just not been loved enough by the previous owners, sure, they took good care of her body, but there is stuff behind panels and doors that probably hasn't been looked at in a very long time, internally she has had some problems, to say the least. So this year while we winter in Sicily, we will begin part of the work we want to do on her, bringing her up to a place where she looks and feels like we care about her, not just on the outside, but from the inside out.
The other day while we were in Faro, we worked on the outside of the boat, in the water, brushing off seaweed that had begun to grow just at the line where the antifouling ended and the smooth glossy exterior of the boat began. Stubborn sea grass, damn, that was tough to pull off! It was tougher still because there was an incredible swell coming in with the tide and the currents were also quite strong. I had my wetsuit on, snorkel and mask, but my heart was thumping hard in my chest because of the very real fear that strong swells, current and tides can induce. Fighting the water as you work on the boat, fins kicking to keep you level, you get quite a rush of adrenaline, nothing like the joy of snorkelling in crystal clear water...the water here was greenish blue and you couldn't see the seabed.
While doing this task, I noticed a ding in the hull, well above the waterline. I am not sure how it happened, but its new, and it will need fixing. Jeroen looked at it too when I called him over, shouting over the din of the waves slapping against the hull. Yeah, he didn't look pleased. Its on the side we never tie up on...so not entirely sure how it happened or when it happened, but its there...and it will need more than just a gentle buffing out...it will need filling in.
On our journey from Faro to Huelva, then Huelva to Cadiz...and finally Cadiz to Gibraltar where we are at the moment, we had the water pump overheat and now we have to deal with that problem as well. Its not the water pump for the engine, but it is the water pump for the water that comes out our taps. Something about the pressure valve, its just not switching off, or its just not able to stop pumping because the pressure never quite fully builds up because of air in the system.
Yeah...I know...you'd think we would just be over it, but surprisingly, its just another thing we put our heads together for and come up with a course of action and hope that the solution resides somewhere within that proactive zone.
The water maker is working, so that is a huge plus. The water maker is making a legit 120 litres of water an hour, and let me tell ya, the water is so clean! Feels great to shower with water that isn't hard, the constant dandruff and scaly dry skin I was suffering is gone! Drinking the water is also clean tasting without any weird odour, yes, we have filters and such anyway, but the water from the water maker is cleaner than drinkable tap water, and we found sometimes the water you get from marinas literally smell like its marinating. Some would say the water from a water maker is almost too clean, that its devoid of minerals, but for now, we are happy we have this water even if its like distilled water in its emptiness. Once we get to Malaga, Spain, we will look for Trace Mineral drops to add to our drinking water. At this point I use the filtered water for drinking to refill water bottles that we keep in the fridge, so this will be easy for me to add mineral drops into the water once we get some. Until then, we still eat vegetables and fruit, so we aren't going to die of a mineral deficiency just yet.
Currently we are sitting on the Spanish side of the rock of Gibraltar. We can see the rock clearly from our berth in the marina. Tomorrow we depart this side to get to our berth on the British side which is Gibraltar for real. That should give us a chance to get some history in with the kids, check out the tunnels and such, climb part of the rock, and generally explore this little oddity of Great Britain that is still a bone of contention for Spain.
We have the kids signed up for three subjects with Wolsley Hall Oxford: English, Maths & Science. Everything else, we teach them as we travel to the places...the geography, the history, the culture, the music...its all more relevant when you live it, isn't it? I grew up in India studying Indian geography and history. By the time I moved to the United States, my first year of university included US history, but I am not sure I got the full story because by the time I went back to university in Japan, I studied the History of Religion, and this covered the slave trade, pretty sure I didn't learn about the slave trade in that one year of US History.
We are all taught in institutions. Some of us learn what we are taught, some of us never sit still, never stop learning. I hope we can instil in our children that hunger for knowledge, that unwillingness to stop at any point in time and say, "I know everything there is to know" because that will never be true. There will always be things you didn't know you didn't know. I realize I may have gone a total of 2 weeks without blogging, but it is sometimes a matter of timing our sailing and homeschooling right so I can have time to write. Plus, sometimes I need my thoughts to be given time to ferment a bit, to find the right balance, to be able to know how to flow.
No one is perfect, least of all me. I realize that it is part of my un-schooling as well. To stop having these scheduled plans, to stop feeling like a failure if I haven't made a list to complete or if I have made a list and I don't complete it. This feeling of never being enough while at the same time feeling too much. I just need to let myself be, to create when the words flow and to be satisfied with doing my best.
I felt vindicated when the kids got a good grade on their first assignment but then I also felt mad at myself for caring so much about this number. As if the number proved we were somehow deserving of something. It doesn't mean anything. Life is full of these sorts of moments where you are meant to match up to some false sense of achievement, everything from certificates of accomplishment to college degrees, random awards to diplomas...its ridiculous that even if I learned how to sail around the world, actually sailed around the world, I would still need to take a course and pass it in order to be certified legally to sail around the world!
A college degree didn't make me more worthy than I had before I earned it, but if we are going on what society believes or has taught us to believe, not only did it make me more worthy of respect, even the institution I received it from is deemed more prestigious than one that gives similar credentials but is less well known.
One thing I recall hearing a lot when I said my Alma Mater was Sophia University, "Ah, ee atama desu ne!" like, "damn, you are smart!"
No, I don't think so, because it was purely a matter of getting in and then staying in and finishing what I started...and it was also a matter of money, having the money to pay for that degree. Many people don't have the privilege to be able to afford university, many more get into debt just to pay for that privilege, in the end, what is it worth if everyone has it and no one cares to help anyone except if they are somehow connected by privilege?
Anyway, I could go on and on, this is some of the stuff Jeroen and I chew on when we think about where we are going with our children and their education. How do you equip a child for life? What kind of life are you equipping them for? How do you teach a child what he is worth? How does a child learn his worth? Do we even have to teach these kids any of that? What is more important? To be considered better than your peers or to be happy with who you are, as you are and why you are the way you are? Most importantly, how important is money? How much money is enough money? How to live a life where money is not the problem or the only solution?
Much of the roots of human unhappiness comes from comparing, from ego, from this sense of having or not having enough. I hope we can do right by our kids, not in some Captain Fantastic sort of way, I mean, damn, I would love for the kids to be all about philosophy and know how to play the guitar (!) but I do want for our kids to be free of societal pressure or unrealistic expectations.
Often we, as a society, we say, "But this is how it is because this is how it always has been..." but no, it doesn't have to be the way we think...life doesn't have to be about our kids having to "fit in" to society like hens in a cage farm, really, societal constructs and the unwritten rules deserve rewriting! We need to offer our children the chance to be anyone they want to be and we ensure to build them up to where they can achieve the goals they set for themselves, not to shape them in our own image or to rush them towards achieving everything we failed to achieve ourselves. We always think we need to equip them for a life that is harsh, for reality that hurts, but does it have to be that way? What can we do differently? How much is happiness worth, or contentment?
I would like for our kids to get to where they understand that they can work because they choose to, because they love to, because they feel a sense of accomplishment doing something that makes the world a better place. If this means that we build up a nest egg for them, so that they will have that freedom, then that is what we will do. I don't want them to have to work because they need to, doing something they desperately loathe, becoming slaves to the system. These thoughts, they are still in the gestational stage, I am not entirely sure where I will go with them as time grinds forward, I just know...that there is more for them to work towards than just becoming consumers or commodities.
If you have the time & the subscription, you have to watch The Mosquito Coast on Apple TV. Its pretty engaging. I have been watching it will the kids, and it makes me think of the life we are living, nowhere near as outrageous as the patriarch protagonist and his family, but I can relate to a lot of what he says...of course, the show could progress on to his ultimate demise, much as the book and the original movie did...but I remain hopeful. For one, Mother is not some timid little mouse, she's a badass in this show, in fact, she kinda seems to have more chutzpah than Father does, something that wasn't in the original Harrison Ford movie.
By this point you may be thinking that I am really skirting the fringe...and by this point, I am thinking that I am likely overthinking it, but the truth is, we are living off-grid! We are a family afloat. We have no source of income, we own no property, we don't have a mailing address at which to receive Amazon.com packages...our children are not in the system...hell, we are not drawing electricity from a grid or water from the municipal mains...Its not a long stretch of the imagination to realize that somehow our thinking will come around to where exactly we wake up in The Matrix.
Everything...absolutely everything deserves a second glance, a revisit, a revision, a revitalization...nothing will ever be the same again, not now, not ever.
I heard this incredible piece of wisdom yesterday when listening to one of the hour long lessons on Waking Up, that app with Sam Harris. I believe he was talking to David Whyte...and this is what was said:
Maturity is the ability to live fully and equally in multiple contexts; most especially, the ability, despite our grief and losses, to courageously inhabit the past the present and the future all at once. The wisdom that comes from maturity is recognized through a disciplined refusal to choose between or isolate three powerful dynamics that form human identity: what has happened, what is happening now and what is about to occur.
It was probably one of the most powerful bits of knowledge that I have heard in a while. It helps that Whyte is so affable too, and his anecdotes shared, so relatable. I felt at once drawn to his sharing while literally feeling my consciousness expand!
You ever get that feeling? When you hear something profound, like...intimately profound...and you feel like this moment, this moment...you just know its important and life changing? Yeah, that is how I felt after hearing him read his poem.
Sam Harris is a blessing to mankind...I know many people take offence to some of his work or thoughts, but I have found him to be one human being genuinely doing everything he can to better the world. He's still only human, and in that respect, people will always be able to find fault in him, but for me, I would totally dig having a friend with a brain like his! I personally wouldn't want to have his brain, it would probably need a lifetime of mindfulness to live with, but then I don't ever have to worry about that possible reality.
So, with that final bit of tangential meandering, I bid you adieu! Be well, fair weather and until I blog again! Oooh, and before I forget, here is a clip from 1 Giant Leap the original album they did.
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