Life on the water?

It’s both like and at the same time the antithesis to those shows where you have the scene with the alcoholic standing up in front of a group of people and saying “hi my name is George and I’m a recovering alcoholic”

“Hi my name is Scott and I want to go cruising.” It really doesn’t sound like much.. there isn’t much overt drama to it. Most people when you tell them you want to get a boat and move onto it to live a nomadic lifestyle give you that look that says. “where did this guy come from? loon in the house!” You get questions from them .. “What about your Job? Your house? Your life.” Though to be honest I also get from some of them “that is so cool” and “I’d love to do that”.

How do you describe to them the dull grayness of the life your living. You’ve been working at the same thing for 15 years and though your very good at your job it just isn’t you anymore. Most of the joy of it long since went away. You live the life prescribed by society.  The house with the mortgage, more types of insurance than you really want to think about, phone bills (three of them), power bills, credit card bills (many), and then the tax bills (on your house, car, business, even taxes on your other bills). But again it just doesn’t fit you.. When you dream you dream of a simpler life. Where getting up in the morning isn’t about fighting to earn enough money to pay those taxes and for all the services that you sometimes wonder about the necessity for. If you own a business you have to have the phones so clients can call you, you have to have Internet, you have to have a car to get to the clients and you have to buy gas to drive to them. There are just so many things you have to have just to exist. It’s the life of a dog chasing its own tail not for fun but just to survive.

That’s just the stuff that you want to get away from and change in your life. Then there is the hard stuff to describe. How spending the night alone anchored out in the marsh with no one around is like pouring soothing and cooling oil on your soul. Maybe call it a massage for the soul. Or how beating home on a 26 mile reach into 4 and 5 ft seas in 20+ knots of wind on a 23 ft sailboat is something special. Yeah it is cold and tiring and uncomfortable but when your sitting there up on the high side looking out over the ocean with the waves marching down onto you it fits something deep in you. It’s part challenge, part meeting with nature part exhilarating. There is nothing like falling asleep to the gentle rocking of the boat at anchor or the gentle sound of a light rain falling on the deck over your head while your curled up below with a hot cup of chocolate and a good book.

Sometimes but rarely I can capture some of that at home. Open the windows on a cool morning or sit out on the covered porch with the rain peacefully drizzling down. The smell, the feel of the moist cool air, gives you a feeling of connected to nature peace. I firmly believe that we too often don’t have that feeling of being alive and connected to the world around us. Our windows are shut and doors closed, the curtains of our house and lives are shut to whats around us. Much of the time when at home I’m answering the phone or sitting on the Internet working. It keeps me distracted and unable to just slow down and smell the figurative roses. Weeks will go by sometimes before I realize I have let it happen again, let myself be distracted from not only living life but experiencing and connecting to it also.