Reuniting the lost lovers of time and distance

This past summer, I finally cast off to live aboard my sailboat. I had been thinking about that moment of casting off for four years before slipping the docklines.

My vision was to live mainly aboard for several years. That may, or may not, still come to fruition, but at this point, I was happy to spend two months living aboard. The fine ship Dolphins is now back "on the hard" for the winter. I look forward to spending next summer living aboard again.

This past summer, I navigated Dolphins down Lake Champlain, through the 12-lock canal to the Hudson, down the river around Manhattan and out to Long Island Sound, across to Provincetown. And from there straight north to Maine for ten days of gunkholing before backtracking to Lake Champlain.

Journeys are discoveries. That's why we enjoy them. I discovered parts of Lake Champlain, I had never seen. I got to imagine being an Abenaki indian rowing a canoe along and seeing the massive Fort Ticonderoga declaring its dominance over north-south traffic along the Lake. I discovered islands and coves in Maine that can only be discovered by boat.

The challenge is to experience journeys as discoveries about ourselves. As such, this journey taught me skills which I had hoped and had expected to learn. Refining my docking techniques, engine maintenance and repair, and navigation skills. It also introduced me to some feelings that I knew I might encounter. I discovered the terror of being underway in fog. I am glad I ran into fog, so that I could learn to overcome my terror and deal with the circumstances.

There were a few discoveries on this journey that were unexpected. And those I treasure the most. Those discoveries were beyond the physical or geographical. They were insights into life in general. In order to make such discoveries, I have to put myself in a dual state of consciousness. One in which I am in the experience and the other in which I remove myself from the physical experience and observe myself objectively.

One if those discoveries was the relationship between time and distance. We have lost the true appreciation of that relationship. I can drive from Burlington, VT and to Manhattan in about six hours. I can board a plane and be hugging my siblings in Germany in just a couple hours more than that. Airmail and FedEx has made shipping distances irrelevant. Internet has closed gaps in finding information and made shopping all over the globe instantaneous.

We have come to expect that distance is a variable. Even flying to the moon is a shorter trip than driving from coast to coast.

But once we are forced to travel at the speed of yore, about seven miles per hour, you begin to realize just how large this globe is. It takes five to six days to get from Burlington to the Statue of Liberty. I saw the Tappan Zee Bridge and was excited that after days of motoring down the Hudson we were "finally" arriving in the city. I stood on the bow while my friend took a picture of me in front of the Tappan Zee. Well, it took another hour to get under that bridge. And since the Tappan Zee is about a dozen miles north of Manhattan, it took another couple of hours to reach Harlem. And the same time again to get to our slip near Liberty State Park. My moment of "finally" was close to an entire day's trip.

Is there any value in rediscovering this relationship between time and distance? Have our advances in technology, which allow us to diminish distance and distort time, been beneficial or to our detriment? I can't say categorically.

But for me, it is hugely important to reconnect with slowness. I feel my mind and focus has suffered from the so-called conveniences of modern day. The cell phone, the fax, the internet, the now, the quick, the superficial, the gloss. I have certainly appreciated the backspace on computers. Compared to the typewriters. But it has changed how I think. I used to maintain regular correspondence using the typewriter and the postal service. I would receive a letter from my friend on the West Coast. It would have taken three days to arrive. Sometimes I wouldn't read it right away, but let it sit on the counter because I wanted to make sure I would be in the right mind-set. Then I would take a few days to absorb the letter, and begin composing my response in my mind whenever I had a few quiet moments. I would have general idea of the shape of my letter. And finally, I would sit down to write back. At a typewriter, you must not only have the general outline of the letter in your head, but also the general sense of the paragraph. And certainly the sentence before committing to the first word. Writing by typewriter made me think in wonderful ways. Today, I get an email, and the pressure is on to respond immediately. Type away, anything will do. Don't worry, the delete key is your way of finally saying what you want. Oh hell, an email is too long. Condense it down to a sentence and text message back.

I know, I am a curmudgeon. And I appreciate the irony that I am bemoaning modern technology's ill effects right here on a blog. Great, I am a hypocritical curmudgeon.

I look foward to living aboard my sailboat again next summer. This time I will be expecting time's inexorably self-determined pace and its jealous relationship to distance which can only be observed from such places as the deck of a ship.

Cogito, ergo I am more confused than ever

I was listening to an interview with Charlie Kaufman the other day. He is the scriptwriter of "Adaptation" and "Being John Malcovich" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind."

I enjoy his mind because it is a house of mirrors. Each one is reflecting himself. Which is him looking at himself ... which is looking at himself.

At one point during the interview, he made the statement, "It's hard being yourself." And that sentence really struck a chord with me.

It is, isn't it. I am constantly working hard to be myself. From small daily routines to larger matters of morality. From making sure I take my vitamins every morning to wondering what kind of person I am that would increase my pace toward a checkout counter and thereby cut off a mother with her full shopping cart.

I try to establish patterns of doing my daily 20-minutes exercise routine and possibly sitting for 15 minutes. And when I fall out of that habit, I berate myself. I say how can I be myself, when I can't even keep up a simple exercise routine?

But I berate myself even worse when I drink more than I write. Or when I don't write at all. "Who are you?" I ask myself. "What kind of person do you want to be? Do you really want to be the kind of person who wastes their one talent?"

Well, perhaps I'm not a writer, I answer back. If I was destined to be a writer, I would have written. Perhaps I am more just a business person. And a sailor. And just overall, a good person making his way through life.

The problem is, I don't dedicate myself to pursuing a business career anymore. Since I left journalism and manufacturing, I have wallowed, looking for direction. And the sailing life which I was embarked upon this past summer, lasted for two months. Now I am back in my house and wondering: Who am I?

As limiting as it often is, we generally define ourselves by our occupations. Right now, I don't have a full-time occupation.

Since I can't look to my occupation in search of myself, I need to define myself by other measures. But it raises existential angst to figure out what those others standards are.

Am I me because I think too much? Or am I asea and have no focused identity because I think in too many different directions and not enough in one single, linear way?

It's hard being yourself.

Revival

Yesterday I got a letter from someone who read my last entry in February and it resonated with events in her life and the emotional challenge of sorting through those parts of her father's life that (as she so succinctly said) "can be documented in print, image and object."

I haven't written since that last entry. Partly since it is a challenge to me to sustain regular habits. But also partly because I questioned the process of navel contemplation in public. And that is to say that I doubted whether my writings could have any relevance to anyone else. It is a nice reminder that writing does matter. It always matters. Maybe not to many, but to someone out there. And then to that person all the more.

I should know this. I was, after all, a journalist for 15 years. But in that case, my writing was about others and not myself. Turning the spot light on one's self is less comfortable, but ultimately no different a news story.

And so, I will attempt more regular posts again. Most importantly, it comes down to this: For me, writing sharpens my focus on life. It is good practice for me. A bit like meditating or sitting: Doing this every day makes me more aware of my everyday. I go through the day wondering: Is this little event what I will write about? Or maybe the interaction with the check-out clerk. Or maybe the unexpected view of blue Lake Champlain through the pink budding apple trees and yellow forsythia.

These days most of my time is consumed with preparing for living aboard my sailboat. This is a lifestyle change that I have been planning for almost four years now. Or, more accurately, it is something I thought I would begin four years ago. But such significant lifestyle changes require more time than you originally think.

Finally, it is time.

I am making last minute repairs and improvements to my boat. For the past couple of days, I have been replacing decrepit hoses to my water tank. And over the past few weeks, every time I go down to the boatyard, I bring another load of things that need to be stowed. Tools, clothes, navigation equipment, kitchen gadgets, organizing bins, books.

Let's stick with the books for a moment. After I got done with the books on weather, navigation, engine repair, cruising guides, I had about 50 lbs of books. There is limited room on a boat, and I hadn't even begun to pick out "books to read." So it became that old game question: If you were stranded on a desert island and could only bring five books, which ones would you bring?

I picked a few sailing narratives. But I think I will also stow a poetry book or two. My favorite poet is Wallace Stevens. But I might have to add Brecht or Pound, or an anthology to broaden my perspective.

This new lifestyle will look something like this: Sail my boat out of Lake Champlain, through the locks to the Hudson. South on Hudson, around Manhattan out to Long Island Sound and up the coast and islands to Maine.

I intend to spend about two weeks aboard, then park the boat somewhere and return to Burlington, Vermont for a week or so to spend time with my daughter and check on my building which I rent out to commercial tenants.

A shuttle lifestyle.

If it works, I may continue for the winter, taking the boat south. But in this new lifestyle, the end of summer is too far off to make any plans.

I have written three quarters of a book on this transition from the safe, steady and traditional life of 9-5, mowing lawn, plugged in entertainment to the life of exploration and simplicity. The books follows my transition, but also examines what has motivated others to throw off the safety of expectations and voyage.

I won't be able to write the last couple of chapters until I make the final step this summer and cast off.

So, this blog is good warm up to capturing my thoughts and feelings as I move through that process.

Projected cast off: Last week of June.

An Examined Life

Whew! I disappeared down the rabbit hole for a while. A few weeks ago, I decided to organize my study. This is a normal winter activity for me. All summer long, while I live outdoors, sailing, beach, hikes, family visiting, trips to the Cape. In the meantime, I just let stuff pile up in my study. My desk becomes a mountain range that rivals the Appalachian chain with crests of letters, photos, financial forms, articles I clipped, books, things "I'm definitely going to read," notes to myself on poems, story ideas, and just bits and pieces of everyday life. It gets to a point where I cannot see the wood of my desk. I put my coffee cup on stacks of paper. Even my mouse pad begins to end up on a pile of stuff.

Then there are the foothills of piles on the floor: Sailing magazines, books that "are definitely next," more folders, my daughter's doodles and scholastic stuff. And there is some bedrock too: A few stacks of books and folders that never found their own home on a shelf or in a file cabinet when I moved into this house seven years ago.

So, this winter I thought I would do more than the normal winter "clean the desk" mission. This was going to be the final assault. Mission Study Storm. Push all the way through to Baghdad. (Are we allowed to joke about this?)

Well, it is not a mission I recommend without prescription-strength drugs. I had no inkling of how psychologically tough this would be. A contributing factor to the depression which developed into a category 4 hurricane was being single. So, there are my warnings to others who might want to attempt this in their own homes.

The way to tackle a project like this conjures up the old joke. Question: How do you eat an elephant. Answer: One bite at a time. So, I picked up the first piece of paper. I needed to look at it and then decide what to do with it: file it? (I am an archivist who files almost all of the mail I get and send) or is it garbage? Okay, next piece of paper. A photo. Keep or chuck?

In this kind of mission, it is not acceptable to create another pile of "I'll deal with this later." Because that pile then just becomes another ridge of bedrock in my study. It's just bulldozing it from one place to another. This time, I was determined to take as many days as I needed to finally clear this land. So, the photo had to find a place in an album, or get scanned and put into a computer folder that was dated and labeled.

I noticed I was suddenly in a mine field, when I found myself in my open file cabinet. I guess I had ended up there because I was going to file something and came across a file of yellowing college papers. "Chinese literature?" Did I really still need that? That file got chucked. But now it was too late: I couldn't just walk a straight line back out of this file cabinet. I had to finish clearing this particular corner of my study before I could get out of the file cabinet.

Now you can see how labyrinthine this project became.

But so far, we are just talking about grunt work. Trudging through the fields of history. So far, we are just talking about (to borrow from Tim O'Brien's short story) "the things that I carried" for so long and needed to be filed. So far, we not talking about taking fire.

The first slugs, you absorb pretty easily. A file with my divorce papers. Then a file with some legal papers from a previous relationship. Then the mortar rounds begin to surround you: Letters from this past love; a poem written for a relationship that burned both me and her. An envelope with a CD and cassette tape of an affair that didn't have enough air to breath, but couldn't die either.

Remember that this is page by page, item by item, so by this time, I am three days into this war. By this time, I have already shredded a couple reams of past personal records that no longer have any significance to me or the IRS. I have created heaps, (perhaps ten reams) of paper that is lifeless to me and needs to be buried en masse in a dumpster or recycling.

But it gets to a point where I just couldn't bring myself to look at one more piece of my history. Do I slash and burn? I was tempted.

Suddenly all time became distorted. I lost emotional perspective and all relevance lost its focus. If this were a battle scene in a movie, this would be the time, when the sound goes silent. You see the explosions, you see the open, shouting mouths of others, you see the grand destruction, but it is silent and I rise and walk calmly among the cacophony of my study, -- which before this began was just heaps of stuff in piles, but now is a distributed carpet of history spread out beyond my study: onto kitchen counters, dining room table, living room coffee table, couches -- I walk among it and finger the lighter as perhaps a soldier might suddenly think about this gun as a friendly nurse who, in a calm voice, is offering a simple solution to all this.

We all grow up with a simple vision. A career. A home somewhere. A marriage. Perhaps a family. But generally, one picture. One journey. Something that has continuity and cohesiveness.

I began to understand early on in my life, that my life was more varied. My parents' divorce split my world in two. Then moving to Germany when I was ten split it again. Moving back to the states split me from family and friends again. That first early love split my heart in two. But even with all that, I could accept that my life as a whole, was whole. It was still one journey. And even after my first seven-year relationship ended, I had a sense of direction in my life. Then came a marriage, a child, a divorce, the ending of one career, and the dissolution of the next. Another five year struggle to find peace within a relationship conceded to failure.

And here I was: Going through each of these pieces of my life.

Suddenly my life did not feel like a grand picture -- a continuous heroic, Joseph Campbell struggle.

It felt like all I had were these puzzle pieces. Pieces that never really fit together. To throw away any one of them is to deny that all of them have their equal place in my past. How to decide which ones to keep and which ones to let go of?

In the middle of it all, the posse came to my rescue. Joel sensed the desperation in my voice and told me to leave the battle scene and spend a few days with him in Boston. I did and it was needed rest. When I came back, I had strength again. I went back at it with cold-blooded determination.

I am pleased to report that I am 90 percent done now. I have taken a break for the last week. All my past is filed away for who-knows-what; posterity? The things that are left are writings that I have left in half-completed stages. Poems, short stories, novels, freelance articles. Do I put the stack on my desk and work through them methodically? Ha! Just kidding. You know that's not me. But if I file them away, they will never have the hope of completion.

So, the process begins again. There is a pile on my desk of folders with beginnings in them. But now, when I walk into my study, I feel like I can breathe again. It is a joy to come in here and feel "clean."

I don't have any grand insight into any of this. The depression of being amidst blown apart pieces of my past has passed. But I don't have any profound lesson from that process. In fact, if anything, it has made me aware -- more painfully than I had ever realized before -- that I am a bit of a Frankenstein. My life is stitched together.