Cruising Resurrection Bay in Alaska, August 2015
I got an unexpected invitation from friends yesterday for Kelly and me to join them for a week of sailing around the Caribbean. Of course I’ve been a sailor since 1988 and I finally made it to the Caribbean with our family trip to Jamaica and Puerto Rico. For some crazy reason, though, it never occurred to me that this was a possibility – that we could go ride the waves for a week in an exotic place. This was a dream of mine in my 20s but I didn’t have the means, or at least it didn’t seem like I did at the time. You either have all of the time and none of the money or all of the money and none of the time.
Back when I was in high school, my dad and his best friend Carl offered me the opportunity to spend the summer working as a deckhand on Carl’s tourist boat in Florida. I opted not to take the offer for some forgotten reason but looking back now it would’ve been a hell of a lot of fun, I’m sure. I love being out on the water, testing oneself against Mother Nature. Facing the great unknown. Humans have been doing it for millennia.
So then life got in the way. Work, kids, mortgages, commitments. But is that life?
To some I might appear to be an extrovert, and I suppose to a certain extent I am. I do get a charge from helping people reach consensus. I love working together with people to come up with new ideas. Being around engaged citizens, and especially helping them organize themselves, gives me an energy unlike any other. I love meeting new people. And yet when it’s time to go home, it’s time to go home. I am never the one to turn out the lights when the party’s over. Give me a chair, a book or a web browser, and I’m happy. I don’t feel compelled to be around people all the time and I’m inclined to just hang out at home given the choice. If I’m an extrovert, it’s on my own terms.
Then reality comes crashing back. It turns out we can’t accept the sailing offer since our days increasingly are spent carting one kid or another to rehearsals, practices, lessons and the like. From a practical point of view it can’t be done. The realization remains, though, that if we wanted to carve out the time in the future, this is something that could be done. Call it a resurrected dream. The invitation isn’t wasted; it has irreversibly expanded my horizons. We might not go this time, but a new possibility has entered our future and I find that exciting.
Every life should have the proper dose of adventure. I need to overcome my tendency of playing it safe and stoke these fires every now and then.