You only live twice

if you're lucky

In the hours before dawn, we pass through the circadian low, when all of our defenses are down. One important self-defense that gets lost in these hours is perspective - when we normally give weight to what’s important and diminish the trivial. We need a proper perspective not just for survival, but to thrive and be healthy.

Occasional insomnia forces me to lie there and confront my worries and fears when they loom impossibly huge and menacing, my perspective turned upside down.

My mind has been fixated on a flipped coin that never lands. The coin represents travel, moving, and motion.

One side of the coin is the feelings that come with adventure and new horizons, stretching one’s experiences. It’s moving towards the unpredictable, scary, and exciting.

The other side of that coin is the feeling of running away, of leaving people behind or abandoning them, being unavailable, of leaving problems unsolved. It’s leaving behind safety and the predictable.

Sailing isn’t what’s triggered these thoughts, though I wonder if all long-term sailors also struggle with this. Sailing is what’s given me time and space to realize that this coin’s been flipping my entire life.

The vast majority of my ancestors came from the Old World. I’ve read enough history to make some educated guesses about the general reasons for emigrating to the New World, but their individual stories are lost to time. Perhaps I know what it felt like down in their guts, a cross between elation and terror, to put history behind them and sail into the unknown.

Some 80 years ago, Castro’s government took the home my grandparents had built near Havana and declared it public property. They chose to leave, and after living in a few different countries, settled in Mexico. There, my mother graduated college, married, and gave birth to me. My parents left Mexico for the US. When they divorced, my mother took me and my brother halfway across the country. In my 20s, I moved by myself completely across the country, to a city where I knew nobody and had never been, but where I settled down and raised my children. Once they became adults, I sold everything and bought a cruising sailboat, and have now sailed almost 9,000 miles, 4 time-zones, and 5 countries away.

At 3am, that coin seems to be falling, and sure to land on “running away”. This is the picture that side of the coin paints: my ancestors fled Europe, my grandparents fled Cuba, my mother fled from her marriage, fled from the shame of divorce. I then ran away from my family, my ailing grandparents, my friends, and all the self-made problems of my 20s, and decades later, I abandoned my family when I sailed away from Portland. That’s a sad, heavy load to carry.

The sun comes up as I emerge from the circadian low and a mental balance returns like a sailboat that rights itself after a broaching. Low clouds hang over the shores of Panama, and friends of ours rest at anchor on the other side of a tiny island.

In a t-shirt and boxers, a pleasant sea breeze blows the heat of my sleep off me as I stand in the cockpit, drinking in the beautiful vista. I feel that sadness and weight evaporate off me, as if by magic, and reinvigorated as I draw the fresh air into my lungs and realize where I am and who I am with. I’ve lived another day.

I’m right where I should be, even if growing up, going to school, working, growing a family, being a pilot, all seems like another life. It was a good life and I mostly did things right. My kids are fine, and their young-adult struggles are their own. Whether I was 9 feet or 9,000 miles away, they wouldn’t ask for or listen to my advice. The decades of soul-numbing corporate IT work and office life that made being here possible are behind me. My wife is loving, healthy, and takes good care of me. I couldn’t ask for a better partner in this adventure.

Miette, our little floating home is sound, her anchor is well dug into the sand, there’s food in the fridge, freshwater in the tanks, and sun on the solar panels. Our little slice of the world is at peace.

The coin stays ever-floating in the air, turning over and over, but today, under the sun on this lovely morning, my perspective is right-side up.