Learning To Stay
"One of the metaphors for ego is a cocoon. We stay in our cocoon because we're afraid - we're afraid of our feelings and the reactions that life is going to trigger in us. We're afraid of what might come at us...There are many ways to discuss ego, but in essence...it's the experience of never being present. There is a deep-seated tendency, its almost a compulsion, to distract ourselves, even when we're not consciously feeling uncomfortable. Everybody feels a little bit of an itch all the time. There's a background hum of edginess, boredom, restlessness.
...The Buddhist explanation is that we feel this uneasiness because we're always trying to get ground under our feet and it never quite works. We're always looking for a permanent reference point, and it doesn't exist. Everything is impermanent. Everything is always changing - fluid, unfixed, and open. Nothing is pin-down-able the way we'd like it to be. This is not actually bad news, but we all seem programmed for denial. We have absolutely no tolerance for uncertainty...
By learning to stay, we become very familiar with this place, and gradually, gradually, it loses its threat. Instead of scratching, we stay present. We're no longer invested in constantly trying to move away from insecurity. We think that facing our demons is reliving some traumatic event or discovering for sure that we're worthless. But, in fact, it is just abiding with the uneasy, disquieting sensation of nowhere-to-run and finding that - guess what? - we don't die; we don't collapse. In fact, we feel profound relief and freedom."
- Quote from the book TAKING THE LEAP by Pema Chödrön
Time and again, I have told people, we are headed to Lagos, and they seem surprised that we are headed to Nigeria! I have to crack up, although, technically, if people knew we were headed towards Gibraltar, would it be so far off to think we may just go to Africa? Not really.
We aren't going to Africa. Mainly coz our insurance doesn't cover us there, so sadly, even Morocco is gonna have to be missed, much as I would have loved that. Nothing on the northern coast of Africa for us, we will just have to see it from a distance...assuming we can. I recall reading The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, a book I am re-reading on Kindle at the moment, and the shepherd boy does mention being able to feel the Levante, the winds coming off Africa, while he is in Spain, and he does actually end up in Morocco at some point, working in the shop of a crystal merchant.
I have begun re-reading that work because I had this sudden urge to...plus, the journey we are on, its the journey I would have dreamed of when I first read the book 25 years ago. The Alchemist opened up my mind...and my soul, really. I recall reading that book when I was in my 20's and it really made an impact on me. I began listening to the omens and believing I understood the language of the universe and such, its strange to admit that out loud, but back then, I really felt like he had written a book that spoke to the core of every human being who dares to dream.
I have had many moments since we started this journey where I have wanted to cry, not just because I am struggling with Perimenopause...well, not entirely because of that, but because I have had great doubt and feelings of insecurity about what the fuck we are actually doing with our lives. I have had feelings of regret while teaching my kids another English lesson while they fidget and yawn...and sometimes I wish I could just send them off to a boarding school so they are no longer my responsibility. I then feel immense guilt for even thinking of washing my hands off the two of them.
I bet this is normal, this is life, right?
Its after I picked up Taking the Leap by Pema Chödrön, a book I bought almost a decade ago and one I am glad I never threw away after so many times moving house and even crossing over from Hong Kong to Holland. I haven't read this book, well, I hadn't read it...all these years...and finally, it seemed to call to me...and as I had time to spare, most of my afternoons now are spent tidying up or reading, what one would gloriously call "me time", Chödrön's book is just one of three books I am currently reading in tandem. The third one is Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.
The three books work well together, one giving me a feeling that the choice we have made, this life we have been thrust into, the nomadic life of boat people, is almost an inevitable progressive direction of where two people like Jeroen and I would have chosen to venture in the long run...the other book gives me hope, reminds me to be mindful and that confirms to me that my ego is getting in the way of me truly being present to the wonder of the life I am living right now. And of course there is the final book, Coelho's simple soul searching first novel, that brings me right back to what we are doing right now...journeying out there into the great unknown, letting go of our fears and finding the treasure of a life truly lived.
The last time I wrote, we were in Cascais. From Cascais we travelled further down the coast to Sines.
Sines turned out to be a beautiful little town. Small, quaint, idyllic in a way that only a place located by the ocean can be. We ended up staying there almost a week in total. I began to have dreams of living there one day, that is how beautiful the place is. We ate out twice in the whole week, one time on the first night, a routine for us now after a long passage, and the second time just a day or two before we left.
The first time we ate out, the winds were so insane we had to hang on to our napkins and were rolling our eyes that the waiter had set up paper place mats under our plates because they were flapping about with every cool gust. The kids, as usual, had failed to wear appropriate clothing, so they were clad in shorts and t-shirts, without any jumper handy, so they ended up borrowing our jackets, which meant Jeroen and I were sitting around at our little al fresco dining nook, feeling the full force of the evening breeze coming off The Atlantic. The food was so-so, honestly, its more enjoyable just to have someone else cook and clean vs doing all that yourself when you've been sailing non-stop for 12 hours, so I won't complain too much.
The second time we ate out, the weather was more favourable, the food was excellent, and this time the kids had remembered their jumpers because I was not going to let them forget! The kids are learning to be more willing to try new dining experiences, even at home, but for us, its just about being able to do something together without the onus of the cooking and cleaning falling to us in a small galley. Dining out can be expensive when you have a family of four, plus Marina fees are also something to factor into a daily budget when you are travelling for life and not for a holiday.
I was at this stage of feeling anxious on the daily because the thought of money, spending money, knowing that it was all coming from a collective pot that wasn't getting replenished anytime soon unless we win the lottery, was slowly driving me mad. That kind of anxiety is not good, but at this stage, it was important for me to stop feeling unhappy thinking of it. My anxiety was slowly leading me to feel resentful for where I am and when even one thing went wrong with the boat, it was triggering a whole lot of further anxiety which was then leading to greater unhappiness...
So I began meditating again in earnest.
In the past, I have paid for at least three years worth of the Waking Up app with Sam Harris. Its an expensive app to purchase, but its worth its weight in gold. And the last time I had a subscription, I recall him mentioning that anyone, anywhere, if they wanted access to the app and couldn't afford it, could actually get a subscription for free because he wanted everyone who needed the help, to have access to the healing power of mindfulness practice.
I have never felt I was in that category, but this time, I didn't feel guilty for contacting them through their website and putting my name down for the one year of free subscription because...fuck it, I don't have a job, I am not earning any money at the moment, neither is my husband, so it seems fair...I reasoned that even if I did happen to have savings, I have paid my fair share three times over, so maybe for now, while I really do need it, I can ask for the access without paying for it...and I am really glad I did.
I am back to meditating 20 mins daily, and sometimes more if I can find the time. After just five consecutive days of practice, I have felt less anxious, I am not as angry with the kids and I am more mindful about how I speak with them as well as myself. This led me to pick up the books I have, which have all helped me feel more alive and present to the world I am currently traversing.
That was not what we got.
Within less than an hour of departure, I had the worst attack of Ménières I have had in a while. Its becoming more common now for my Ménières disease to play up while we are underway because the vertigo aspect of it is part and parcel of sea sickness as well. The only reason I know that its Ménières symptoms is because the feelings of sea sickness are accompanied by fullness and sometimes sharp pain in my inner ear, I feel so sick I have to take short breathes, and this time I was full on puking even though I hadn't eaten a thing since the night prior. Nothing worse than dry heaving or chucking up saliva and still feeling no relief.
The positive is that by putting an ear plug in just one of my ears and lying down in bed on my side, generally it puts me straight to sleep thanks to the severe fatigue that accompanies a Ménières attack. I end up falling asleep and waking some 2-3 hours later feeling human again and this technically should be the end of the attacks as long as I don't have to go below deck once more to do anything that doesn't involve me staring at the horizon.
Sadly, this journey from Sines to Lagos, I went below deck to prep the family lunch, macaroni and pesto, which turned out to be a totally worthless experience because by the time I served it the only person truly capable of eating was Micah.
Micah had spent so much of our initial journey from The Netherlands to France, puking his little guts up. No time of day was exempt, he was puking at 3am in the morning, 7am in the morning, 4pm...you name it, the only reason we even stopped in France, in Cherbourg, was because the skipper was concerned for his well being. Back then it was a 4 day journey of non-stop sailing. Now Micah seems to have found that staying outside with Jeroen, braving the elements, fully dressed in his wet weather gear, hat and new glasses, is the one and only guarantee he has of avoiding sea sickness.
Sometimes its in your head, right? I mean, Jeroen admitted he felt sick, even though he hadn't been below deck at all except to pee, but then there is Micah, literally chirpy as a bird with verbal diarrhoea! The kid literally talks, non-stop, for hours on end.
You know, in The Alchemist I was reading about journeys like the ones we go on, and the shepherd speaks about the silence that comes when people take these long journeys...let me dig that quote up...
"But, in the desert, there was only the sound of the eternal wind, and of the hoofbeats of the animals. Even the guides spoke very little to one another.
"I've crossed these sands many times," said one of the camel drivers one night. "But the desert is so huge, and the horizons so distant, that they make a person feel small, and as if he should remain silent."
The boy understood intuitively what he meant, even without ever having set foot in the desert before. Whenever he saw the sea, or a fire, he fell silent, impressed by their elemental force." - Paulo Coelho
I read this and I felt a strong surge of being present...I totally feel this way when we are underway. You can sit in one spot, staring at the sea or the ocean all around you, the blue that goes on for miles and miles, stretching from horizon to horizon, with no land or bird in sight...and sometimes the water is so still as to seem like glass...and other times there is fog that envelopes you so you remind yourself gratefully that the autopilot knows exactly where you are going and radar will tell you what is coming. You become present to the past...if that makes sense. You begin to have a profound awareness of all the mariners that came before you. All the mariners who stared out at the same horizon, the same salt water, the same blue sky, except without the instruments we depend on in the world we live in today. They would have followed stars like the shepherd did with his caravan in the desert as he journeyed towards his own personal legend. Since our journey from Porto to Cascais we haven't travelled at night, so there has been no stargazing to be had as we anchor in bays with ample man made light to pollute the vastness of the night sky.
Much as we have spent many a journey in silent contemplation, after watching Micah this leg...I don't think the little man got the memo!
That kid can talk! Jeroen generally gives me the side eye when he wonders out loud where on earth he got that trait from!
Yeah...that kid is mine alright! Haha.
Sometimes he's talking because he doesn't like the silence, or maybe he's bored, or maybe he's just so full of nervous energy he needs to let it out...who knows, but talk he does, about anything and everything...but he kept Jeroen company at the wheel from our departure from Sines, right before sun up all the way to our arrival in Lagos (Portugal!) as the sun was slowly inching lower in the sky for the day. He kept Jeroen company while I was sick and asleep below deck.
He's a trooper, our youngest. He's becoming more capable and dependable. He's eager to help, eager to learn, not sure when that happened as I am sure in the past I have written about how Sasha was the one so keen to show Micah how its done, but now the tables have turned where interest in sailing is concerned and Micah is keen to show how able he is, and he is proving to be quite the little sailor as well.
I am proud of him. Hell, I am proud of us...all of us!
Its not an easy life that we have chosen, but its also not that hard.
People may wonder how someone goes about doing what we are, and I often get messages from friends who say things like, "You are so brave!" or "Damn, you are fearless!" and that isn't entirely true. I don't feel brave. I don't feel fearless. I just think I do stuff without having any preconceived ideas of how its going to be. Or maybe that isn't entirely correct. I think I consider that there are things I know and things I don't know...and then there are things I don't know I don't know...and those things, I can't even begin to fear because I don't know what to fear. Sometimes you just do shit, don't you? I mean...sometimes you choose to do something and you know later you may have moments of regret, but if you own it, if you take full responsibility for choosing that life, you just learn to live with your choices.
That is how I felt with the restaurant too.
I had come fresh off taking Landmark Forum, this course that could be described as a personal development course or self-improvement course at best, and which could be described as a cult at worst...its not exactly a cult, it has cultish elements, like the happiness bombing, the lingo, and the hard sell to get you to keep signing up for more courses, but all in all, marketing tactics aside, I found the course worth every penny I put into it. I achieved more self-betterment in a weekend of that shit than I had achieved in years of therapy. Much of the stuff they covered wasn't breaking new ground, it was the stuff you know you have heard and you know makes sense, but the way in which they presented it allowed you to see it all in a new light. I don't know how else to put it but the way the presented stuff, the loosely woven threads of new age thinking with modern psychology, hard science with philosophy, motivational jargon with downright tough love...it just made sense to me and it stuck.
There were moments while running Confusion Plant Based Kitchen where I doubted myself greatly. I was just feeling so darn sorry for myself, you know? Through the protests, through the insecurity of when all the mayhem would end...and then again through Covid-19 and all the nonsense of government intervention, the anxiety of not knowing how the hell we would make rent each month with so little revenue, watching the bank balance go from healthy to anaemic. Yeah, I had many moments like that, and I would always come back to what I learned in the forum...I would take a deep breath and say, "I chose this! I chose this and so I am responsible for my choices. It is what it is, and like with everything in life, it cannot be anything but what it is..."
Sometimes you just have to believe you know you can change, not just yourself, but the world at large. Many people who say, "I'm good, I know what I am doing..." or who say no to something before actually knowing what they are saying no to, are also the people least willing to take a deep look at their failings and the way they project those failings on others and out into the world. I say this because I had spent so much of my life blaming my parents for my own short comings, sure, they weren't perfect, but who is? I certainly am not! When you expect your parents to fill a niche that you create for them, you do not allow them to be who they are. You let your disappointment in who they are blind you to the very real possibility that you yourself may well be a disappointment. Forgiveness starts with the self, that is what I learned there. Its carried me through many moments of uncertainty, and its made me look long and hard at the relationships I have nurtured, some of which were not entirely healthy for me. I have learned that I am the master of my own destiny, not just in some whimsical fairytale manner of speaking, I write my own history! I am the creator and no one can take that away from me. Life is a blank canvas, it is up to the individual how they wish to paint it. This is everything I took away from taking that personal development course. It changed the way I view and approach life, and it changed my personal accountability in how I lived life.
In every single moment, I am who I choose to be.
More than two decades ago, I got a tattoo on my left forearm that simply says, "I am in this moment being me." At the time I was trying to accept myself, the good and the bad, the loudmouth and the silent crier, the sinner and the saint, the drunken halfwit and the sober half still trying to make a stand for my own sanity. I was trying back then to make peace with who I am in each moment, and I guess it is much the place I am still in, only now I am older and the concept of what I am grasping at is clearer than it was back then. As the tattoo slowly bleeds into illegibility on my ageing, weather beaten skin, and as more tattoos crowd around it threatening to supersede it altogether, I am grateful for every choice I have made but more so for the choice to see myself as imperfect and to accept that as not being a permanent thing. Nothing in life is permanent, who knew that it would take me until almost 45 to come to understand this very basic of Buddhist precepts.
Too often its easy to blame external circumstances and to play the victim. I have been there, hell, sometimes I still go there, but at least now I am mindful and I am aware of my tendency to choose to feel sorry for myself and I am able to give that up quicker than I would have in the past.
Mindfulness practice saves me every single time.
I used to get mad at myself for giving up so often, knowing how useful mindfulness practice has always been for me, but I don't get mad at myself any more. I know, I just need to make it a habit, much like how the mind wanders during meditation, that is how my commitment sometimes can be, and if I look at it as neither good nor bad, if I look at it as simply being, then I can always come back to the breath, I can always come back to the practice, and I can always come back to this peaceful, more enlightened way of living my life to the fullest.
So I am on this mission right now, to practice daily towards a goal of 4000 collective minutes of consecutive days of meditation. I reckon it will take me two months of daily practice. I also missed yesterdays session because we were sailing all day, so instead of feeling like I fell off the mindfulness bandwagon, I am just picking up where I left off. I am reading one chapter a day of each one of the three books I am reading daily. I am not looking at it as homework, I am not looking at it as bettering myself, I am just genuinely enjoying reading and being present to the feeling of gratitude that I actually have that freedom right now.
I am also giving up the anxiety about money. We have enough. We don't spend a lot and even if we spend a lot we will still be fine, but for now, we aren't spending a lot. We have run the numbers. If we exist the way we are existing now, even if we didn't bother getting a job, which really, we are not in that mindset, never have been, we can survive just fine for at least a decade. This life doesn't cost a lot, we are careful but not to the point of forgoing simple pleasures, but then again, we don't really need much. We are no longer plugged into the consumer driven economy. We are no longer worthwhile contributors to the capitalist system. Its funny when you think of it really...its like we are going back in time, to the days of the nuclear family, to educating our children instead of leaving that up to the state. We are no longer dependent on the state for anything and so they cannot tell us how we can or can't live our lives. We have no income and so we are not taxable. We have no land, so there is no tax to be paid for a patch of earth. The ocean has become our backyard, and though we may stop in Marinas that sometimes charge more than makes sense for what they provide, we also spend a considerable number of days on anchor, free of the money machine.
Solar power is free. Wind power is free. Water made from the ocean and sea is free. As long as we have food in our bellies and clothes on our back, we ought to be set. We don't need much more than a decent data plan to stay in touch with family on several continents. If you think about it...its really pretty amazing.
When we started this journey we were worried about how the kids would cope without Netflix and unlimited wifi...hell, truth be told, I was secretly worried about how we would cope without all of that nonsense! Turns out majority of the Marinas we have stopped in, paying anywhere from 30 Euros to 100 Euros a night, all have crappy wifi! They claim they have wifi, and sure, you can certainly see it present on your screen when you search, but its not even worth a WhatsApp message home, and forget about streaming Netflix!
So we have our T-mobile plan for our regular personal smartphones, this gives us about 20GB of data in the EU, but downloading a few movies or a season of something will immediately bring you down to nothing, so I have learned all this the hard way as I have spent the last two weeks without any data! This brought me to searching and finding creative ways to get data only plans for less. So now I have used an app called Airalo to buy 50GB of data (for USD100) that I am given 90 days to use, more than enough on top of the 20GB per month I get from T-mobile. Hell, that is a grand total of 110GB for 3 months, if I use all that up, there is something not quite right with my screen time allowance, I need to get out more! Jeroen purchased 100GB of data through the same app for USD185...this has given the kids some data allowance to download shows of their on Netflix while we are in a Marina so that they can then watch it when they are allowed screen time on Sundays.
Most times if we treat ourselves to a movie, we watch one together as a family. So for the most part, we are this collective of humans. Initially, especially when I was feeling at my most vulnerable, I was so desperate to get away from what I was seeing as the stifling companionship of family in a confined space. Then as I brought my focus back to mindfulness practice and the Buddhist concept of impermanence...I experienced a profound shift in consciousness. Our children will not be children forever, one day, they will grow up as we grow old, and one day they will move on to have children of their own and we will cease to be the ones they look to for spiritual guidance and emotional nourishment.
This is everything I have come to understand in the past week...and its everything I have arrived at not late nor early, I have arrived at this place at exactly the time I was meant to arrive.
Awareness, self-awareness, its like the tides...it flows and it ebbs...and there is no reason for me to be angry or ashamed that I was somehow caught off guard by what I have come to understand...I am just grateful that I am here and that I am happy to be exactly where I am.
On our journey over from Sines, Jeroen hoisted the sails, the main sail and the genoa...I was asleep below deck because I was too sick to handle being upright. When I came out it was because I heard a big bang and I wasn't sure if we'd been hit by killer whales, you know how it is when you have been in a deep sleep and are suddenly brought back to consciousness. When I went back up on deck, still wrestling with my life vest and its various straps and clasps, I asked him what had happened.
Micah was the one who replied, all excited, "Papa tried to start the engine back up, but it won't start!"
I was still trying to process what he said when I looked over to Jeroen, sitting legs outstretched in the cockpit outdoors, sun glasses hiding his eyes, the brim of his hat pulled low, he didn't say a word. His body language was confusing to me because he looked at once like a man who was relaxed and without a care in the world....and quite paradoxically, he looked like a man who had lost all hope and had given up his fate to the wind.
In many ways, he was both. He knew what the problem was...but he also knew that he couldn't attempt to fix it at that point. The winds were strong, buffeting us at between 20-30 knots, we were making good speed with purely sails, travelling between 6 to 8 knots over ground without use or need for the engine to be running. He had wanted to turn the engine on because the wind and the waves were becoming quite dangerous and he had intended on furling the sails once he had a chance to motor into the wind...and that was when we found out that the engine wouldn't start.
So we sailed. We sailed in silence.
I am grateful for my mindfulness practice that, by this point, had been well underway, because I avoided asking any more questions, I accepted his silence as a need for silence, and we continued through the lashing waves that sometimes towered 3 meters high, reaching well above the solar panel arch, with our sails still carrying us forward at increasing velocity, no motor running, just listening to the sound of the blue space that surrounded us.
Our boat is an incredible vessel, this much I can say. Kokoro is built to last. All the minor problems we have with something like the water maker or a battery needing jump starting, its nothing worth worrying about because the body of our Forgus 52 is built like a brick shithouse! We navigated the insane swells of the Atlantic Ocean where the winds were literally wailing past our stays, sometimes with waves slapping us right in the face, and Kokoro was steady as the hand of a teetotaller! We could feel it, really feel the weight of her as she carried us up and over each insane volume of shifting water as it undulated beneath us and all around us.
If I have anything I can feel secure in without a doubt, it is our boat. It doesn't matter that somewhere there is a freshwater leak and occasionally we need to kick the bilge pump on, most boats have to kick the bilge pump into action from time to time, the main thing is the hull is an incredible piece of work and we are going to be just fine as long as we are in this here boat. I have faith in all 25 tonnes of her!
I had a dream last night...and in my dream, someone died and had willed me an apartment in Hong Kong that was worth 26 million Hong Kong dollars. Hey, its a dream, ok? Haha. I was in my dream thinking, oh my lord, this is just...no words! That would be 3 million Euros, or just short of that...and we could fix all the little problems on Kokoro and we would not have to work for the rest of our lives! I woke up thinking...damn, that's pretty cool! Even in my dream, even with 3 million Euros suddenly in my possession, I didn't think we need to give up sailing...and more importantly, I didn't think we needed a new boat or that we need to replace Kokoro! If you think about it in the context of The Alchemist...dreams are the language of the universe...and if that is the case, I think I am finally feeling like this boat, this life, this present moment, it feels right...I am at peace with it.
Well, I guess that is all I have to share with you this week.
We will remain in Lagos, Portugal for another few days, maybe a week. Two nights in the Marina while we try to get some stuff fixed, and then on to anchorage so we can check out the incredible limestone caves and rocky outcroppings along this section of The Algarve. You can see how beaten down the land has been thanks to the harsh winds coming off The Atlantic Ocean, its stunning and a bit daunting to consider how we make it to most of these areas without paying for some tourist trap boat tour.
The Algarve is expensive going but its not all bad, plus, this is literally a once in a lifetime journey, we won't be coming back here anytime soon, so we are going to live it and love it...try to see what we can and make the most of anchorages and our tender.
We had planned on wintering in Croatia. We had planned on being in Greece to see my mother-in-law by September. We had many plans, but now its looking more like we are going to stop, take a deep breath, and let the winds take us where they will take us. We have given up our expectations and we have stopped rushing forward.
Now, more likely, we will winter in Sicily after we spend time exploring Corsica and Sardinia. Maybe we will take the boat out the water in Sicily and we will live on land for a bit while we work on the boat. Maybe we will sand down wood surfaces inside and polish or paint the boat. Maybe we will get the leather sofas reupholstered. Who knows...maybe we will do a lot of cool things besides, and no matter what we end up doing it will be exactly what we are meant to be doing.
Never been to Sicily...and I have no reference point by which to even begin to fathom what the experience of wintering there would be like, so I am genuinely looking forward to any and all experiences yet to come.
Here is hoping you will share in the journey with us and that some of my current sunny optimism rubs off on you.
Fare thee well, and until next time...fair winds. :)
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