The day after my last day, it rained. Mostly softly but also with some vigorous downpours. My satisfaction with that situation reminded me that it’s important to decompress after an intense work experience.
This job was more like Krohne and Hamilton Marine than like the Three Mile Harbor debacle or the horrifying Windham Falls unethical quagmire. I mostly like the people I worked with and, while I have a heavy dose of judgement about how the bosses handle their business, I’m not rooting for their misery.
At the same time, I always wondered whether I would be able to support the catamoron charter industry. This kind of crewed charter, meals included, is so far outside my experience and so opposite from my dearest desires that it seemed likely that I’d pick up a paycheck or two, holding my nose the whole time, and then flounce out with my opinions intact.
Instead, I ended up with a group of men (some sooooo young that I couldn’t help blinking with puzzlement at them sometimes) who were up to the task of boarding these shitty boats from pitching dinghies in ridiculous chop and acting as the experts in plumbing, electrical, engines, aircon, rigging, and so much more. It’s hard to be snooty when these guys were coming to me for the float switch and then going back out there, in all kinds of tropical weather, with their strippers and crimpers and butt connectors and all the same things that have kept me and James and Beluga Greyfinger alive and safe for so long.
So many of us were liveaboards and not a one was on a catamoron. They’d seen the shoddy construction of these floating palaces and, perhaps I’m wrong but, I think they had higher standards than gaining expansive spaces that become pinball fields in surging waves. Buying old monohulls that need a metric fuck-ton of work makes so much more sense than buying a hurricane salvage catamoron with electronic systems that will never, ever, function correctly for more than a few years at best.
Today is the first day that I would have gone to work but didn’t. Day two of my post-employment period felt a lot like the first, with less excuse. I change and grow in the dark, though, and sometimes I cope with feeling like that spinning circle on a computer that tells you something is happening without letting you in on the process. Today, I am present in my moment, on my boat, with my companions and my unformed ideas about the future that nonetheless are so bright…I think it’s time for sunglasses.
I’m not going to slough off these connections as fast as I have at times in the past. I like these folks. I’m hoping that the next chapter works out in a way that will result in sending invitations to visit us in Bocas del Toro, Panama, or on the nearby island of Bastimento.
The best thing about the future, though, is that it’s wide open. A loved one knows me so well, she has bansai’ed into someone who can both engage with the possibilities of my life and maintain a sense of the quantum uncertainty that plays out. It’s not for everyone – this excitement for possibility, knowing that our direction is never settled. It’s for me, though, and it’s deeply satisfying to get back to the elemental facts of life.
We will go with the weather.
We will take care of each other and the boat.
We will find joy and let pleasure in.
Grateful and, I am so clear, lucky to get to watch you grow and change in the dark. You two and a half Sailors are a stunning lava lamp to marvel upon, separately and together. Attending deeply without grasping is a skill you taught me yourself.
The plasticity of your spirit and mind is amazing to me. Superpowers. You are able to enjoy scheming over your highly detailed life-or-death-careful travel planning, plotting your global course nine months in advance. And yet you do adore times like these, when you leap and relax into a floating freefall, not clue one about what’s next. You love to be at anchor, exploring and project-ing, yet oh how you love to be underway.
This unmoored security is possible only because you’re so clear about who you are. What you value and what you need. It’s inside your ethics, not a structure or a vessel, that you feel most at home.
Congratulations on quitting. I’ve joked many times that Quittin’ Day holds up as a fourth holiday for y’all, behind your birthdays and anniversary. Quittin’ Days have traditions, emotions and activities, routines of celebration similar to seasonal holidays for many of the rest of us.
QDs mark the end of one liminal passage and the beginning of the next. Your soon-to-be-former colleagues at Whatever Job start to settle into the truth that you are leaving and scramble to try and assuage their loss. Job demands crescendo in the last week as they stumble over one another to milk whatever value they can from you before you go. You say all the coworker goodbyes that are sometimes grief, sometimes relief. You visit the place you liked to eat lunch the most at least one more time.
And then
you’re
gone.