Lose Yourself in Mauritius

Timeless days have stretched into weeks on the Island of Mauritius. After 10 days in port, we left Port Louis and it's horse races behind (and a little of our cash) last week and, with 11 people from other cruising sailboats on board, made a party of sailing up the island to Grand Baie.

We have been here at anchor a week now working on our latest boat project – cockpit curtains! With water temperature down to 21 C, it’s a lot cooler on passage and this is only going to get more so as we head next south to the Cape of Good Hope. Its seems our thinned blood of the tropics no longer has any taste for cold salt spray in the press of 25 knots of breeze. It seems we favour the comfort of a sheltered cockpit, tucked in out of the main force of the wind, sheltered from the dreaded splashes that find their way onboard and into the cockpit. To show for 6 hard days of sewing, we have 6 new curtains made from Sunbrela (acrylic cloth), 1mm window plastic and heavy zippers. Running aft from the dodger to the helm, each panel is zippered to the bimini overhead and to each other and then hangs down to the cockpit coaming where they are fastened securely, three curtain panels to a side. We broke the last of our sewing machine needles doubling stitching the last of the seams, so that was the end of that. Good enough for now.

As a distraction from our labours, we have had the pleasure of meeting Roz Savage, woman ocean rower extraordinaire. This week she ended a 154 day row (she put to sea last May) across the Indian Ocean from Australia. She ended her voyage at the Grand Baie Yacht Club, not 300 meters away from where we are anchored in Conversations. We joined the crowd on the dock to greet her, and later had lunch with her. Now that’s an accomplishment without cockpit curtains! Check out her website www.rozsavage.com for more about true grit.

Reflections

[This blog marks a departure from it has been. I have been much inspired by my conversations here in Mauritius, with Michael and Dominique and Roz Savage, in particular. “Reflections”, is Michael’s inspiration, a reminder to share the inner voyage is Roz’s. Thanks!]

At our almost daily evening dinner gatherings of sailors and new friends, we indulge in perhaps too much wine and too much beer, but never too much conversation. The night before they headed back out to sea, bound for South Africa, we had a farewell dinner with a sailing couple Michael and Dominique, crew aboard Pachamama (www.toptotop.org). Sailors are naturally a curious lot, bent on living out their lives in their own way. Added to this, was a time with Roz, talking about her row across the South Indian Ocean. It was not surprising we got on to talking over dinner about following ones dreams. We spoke of the confusion we suffer over exactly what do we dream of doing and how do we differentiate what we are meant to do, from what we are conditioned to want do. We agreed, that from the moment of our birth onward, we come under a lot of pressure to value this and that, to act in this way and that, and to see the world in terms of good and bad, right and wrong. As a result, we fix ourselves reflexively in a particular place in the world according to our conditioning. After all, if we did not indoctrinate each tribe member, how else could mankind create societies and cultures? But what cost does this indoctrination have to the individual’s happiness? That’s you and me we are talking about here! Added to this, the bumps and bruises we accumulate over the natural course of our lives bend us a bit (or a lot) out of shape. Getting down to sorting between what we are born to be doing with our lives and what we have been trained to do, or “should” be doing, is tricky work.

I need to digress for a moment to address a core assumption; namely, that each of us is born to a unique mission in life, a unique thing we ought to be doing with our lives. (Why this is so, and ‘who’ if anyone or anything chooses such a mission for us is, is another question). When we are engaged in that mission whatever it is for each of us, our experience of life is inherently satisfying AND usually difficult. But uncomfortable or not, when we are engaged in our mission, we experience our lives as being full of purpose and meaning. The corollary is also true; to the extent we fail to engage our life mission, we suffer for want of purpose and meaning. But regardless, our lives are difficult. The way I see it, if life is going to be tough either way; it might as well be spent in purposeful engagement. (I think a lot of us fail to seek our mission by getting lost in our natural desire for comfort and security, but that too, is a question for another day.)

Let’s return to the question of “How do we sort out what we are meant to be doing from what we have been conditioned to be doing.” Or in terms of Sail7Cs, how do we set COURSE for what we are meant to do?

In our dinner conversation we came next to the bold declaration: “we need to sort between our neuroses and our passions”. For we are indeed creatures of habit and patterning and most of us suffer our own neuroses to which we are, ironically, passionately attached! (Def: Neuroses are a class of functional mental disorders involving distress whereby behaviour is within socially acceptable norms.) We are drawn to the familiar in us, even it is uncomfortable, distressful, or even neurotic. And we are mostly unaware of this process in ourselves and its content. Most of us, from all our training, have a pretty good idea of who we should be, but not many of us have a very good idea of who we really are.

So, to the short strokes: Awareness is the first landfall on the voyage to choice and change. COURSE calls on us to become conscious of our patterning by doing deep personal discovery work to learn who we really are so that we can separate the instilled “shoulds” from the deeply held passionate wants. Tragically, we fear this discovery process, because at some level, ironically, we fear we will discover what we already intuit - that who we really are is not who we were told who we should be! Which of course what we are trying to discover. And, our social system doesn’t do much to encourage this process of self-discovery either, preferring to focus on telling us who we should be. Our society on the whole mocks “personal development” as soft and fuzzy, of being somehow irrelevant, which I suppose it is, for it’s purposes. But whose purpose do we want to prevail in our lives?

My advice: Do personal development work, the deeper the better, and do it life lone. Do workshops, retreats, get coaching, meet cool people, etc. and talk about stuff. It’s actually a lot of fun once we get past our initial fear, and it contributes to becoming whole, happy and engaged in your life mission. It’s a core part of COURSE.

On another day, I want to explore the other side of the equation: How do we learn more of what we are “authentically passionate” about. Most of us have never had permission to go exploring our passions. How do we get off the dock and put to sea in discovery of what we are meant to do?

In the meantime, let me leave John Masefield’s words from his poem SEA FEVER set the tone for this discovery - Cresswell

SEA FEVER

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way, where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.