The rough along with the smooth

Beautiful Key West, Florida. (Image by David Mark)

We had thought we were going on a sailing trip.

At least, that’s how it was pitched to us. But when we set out in the 38-foot Bantry Bay gigs, there was no wind. Therefore, the oars were distributed, and the ten of us rowed out of the harbor, stroke by stroke.

For the next six hours, we headed east over the gentle three-foot swells that were the only remaining vestiges of the previous day’s storm. For a while, we caught some wind and made way toward our destination, but the configuration of our sails made it impossible to sail upwind, and the wind shifted unhelpfully. We lowered our sails and rowed on. Then we raised them again; then we lowered one sail and half of the crew rowed; and so on, until the last hour or so, when we rowed and sang ourselves all the way to the tiny island where we would camp for the night.

I was not mentally prepared for a six-hour rowing trip, but I quickly accepted the situation. If I’ve learned anything about sailing, it’s that the experience is different every time and that you can’t really have any firm expectations about how things will be. That’s the challenge and the fun of it, and you might as well embrace the variability and unpredictability as fundamental to the activity. It is the nature of sailing, and boating in general, that you must respond to the conditions and be ready to change your plan.

Additionally, there’s a lot of activity that goes along with rowing or sailing that doesn’t actually move the boat. You rig the boat and then you unrig it (we cycled through this multiple times on our trip). You stand by oars and then boat them (that is, distribute them to all the rowers and then put them all away; we cycled through this multiple times, too). Once ashore, you tie up securely to prevent damage to the boat. These routines require communication and vigilance.

I often joke that I’d like to show up for a sail in a pretty summer dress, carrying a picnic basket. The joke is that the reality is never close to that, at least on the sailing trips I go on. I pretty much have to work the whole time, glamourlessly, as though we’re driving a minivan that takes several people to operate. The reward, if we’re lucky, is a couple of blissful hours (or a few blissful minutes) of flying along on salty breezes amidst camaraderie, cooperation, and beautiful scenery.

On a deeper level, however, I’m starting to understand that if I define a good sail so narrowly—fair weather and winds, nothing going wrong, and not having to get my hands dirty or do a lot of messing around with the rigging—I’m missing out on most of it. I don’t knit because I want a sweater; I knit because I want the experience of constructing the sweater, stitch by stitch, with all of the challenge and adventure that entails.

Currently, there are a few obstacles I’m facing in the path of entrepreneurship. I could get all cranky about the hours that I’ve put into filing tax payments on behalf of an out-of-state employee, hunting down insurance, or dealing with the emergencies that arise. But that’s a limited and unrealistic view. It parallels my experience with teaching, which, to paraphrase an old joke, would be so easy if it weren’t for the students. There are always unwanted things to cope with and stuff that will go wrong. I have come to accept that these obstacles aren’t things that make it hard for me to do my job—dealing with these obstacles is the job.

The wind dies when you’re farthest from shore. The problem that comes up is the one you have never had to deal with before. These are basic truths of life. I can wish that things were simple and smooth, but I don’t really want that. How many boring Saturdays during the pandemic would I have been thrilled to share a boat with ten other people, laughing and singing and working toward a common goal? So I will take the rough along with the smooth and the windless days along with the breezy ones. I will discard the idealized fantasy in my head and enjoy life for what it is.

At least low wind makes for good rowing.