Welcome, newcomers to Sailing Totem! For our family’s backstory to a decade of sailing around the world, see Who and Why. For hopeful cruisers, articles addressing the most common questions found in Start Here. Can we help you? Learn about our lifestyle coaching or get in touch.
This week our family has the incredible opportunity to share our story to a wide audience thanks an interview with Megyn Kelly on TODAY. Hopefully the morning interlude offered these newcomers inspiration and a few minutes to contemplate a different way of life.
We can’t know what will happen until the actual interview. While I expect we may be called to address some of the common questions about cruising, like storms (haven’t been in one) and pirates (knowable regions, don’t go there) and educating our children (our oldest starts college next month), hopefully we’ve been able to communicate that this is an accessible dream. I’ll call success if we crack the door for others choose a more adventurous life, whether that’s afloat like ours or along different path. [Update: I think we did! Watch below!]
People make radical changes in their lives for all kinds of reasons. We looked forward to more time together as a family, a chance to raise children as citizens of the world, to appreciate the privilege of being born with choices and options in our lives, to know the diverse natural wonders of our planet first hand so they might play a role in protecting it. What we didn’t anticipate is how deeply fulfilling it would be.
Important reasons why it’s fulfilling connected recently in an unlikely source. Sebastian Junger’s book Tribe is about PTSD and the challenges military vets face after coming home, but in talking about the benefits of a cohesive society alleviating the incidence of PTSD his book nails assets of the cruising life:
…human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered “intrinsic” to human happiness and far outweigh “extrinsic” values such as beauty, money and status.
Competence comes with time (we know many cruisers who started with very little actual sailing experience. As in, no prior experience at all). Living your values, your dreams, begets feeling authentic with life choices. Our family is tight, as is our community: Kevin Bacon has nothing on degrees of separation among cruisers.
Choosing cruising meant departing from a life measured in extrinsic values in favor of those intrinsic values, a switch that brought unanticipated contentment. We’d like to help others find that peace, which is why we’re here: why this blog is written, why we’re interviewing with Megyn Kelly, why we put our private selves out there.
I suspect many of the broader audience watching TODAY this morning assumes such big changes are out of their reach. In fact, it’s much more achievable than most imagine; the hardest part is making the switch. Not saying someday, or it’s OK for someone else, or I don’t have the time / funds / freedom; not that, but setting a date, making a plan, and following through.
We long held the dream, but only morphed it into a plan after many years. With a departure date and a commitment, we papered the biggest uninterrupted wall in our home with what Jamie called The Giant Map of Dreams. It had a whiteboard-like surface allowed us to use the 14 foot long map as a creative space. Where could we go? Jamie and I marked dream destinations with dry erase markers, noting the bays we hoped to visit. Our younger children added continents and countries from their imaginations. We did not begin to conceive of the stories these places would tell, of the people we would meet. That swimming with sharks would come to feel almost natural. That babies in faraway places would be named for our children. That wild islands would stop us speechless with their grandeur, or bleached reefs shake us with their fragility. That a little girl in a dugout canoe would ask to trade three underripe, undersized tomatoes for basic writing tools. That everywhere, we’d be reminded that our world is full of beautiful people with their own stories to share. That too often, we’d learn about social injustice and experience environmental devastation first hand.
Now the map of our chartplotter traces a line for the route we’ve sailed Totem around the world. The Giant Map did its job of feeding dreams of sailing to exotic places. We realize now the impossibility of visiting everywhere we hoped, at least on the first lap. But we’ve grown appreciation for finding the magic in ordinary places – it’s always there, somewhere! – while reaching some of our dreamed-of anchorages as well.
Think it might be for you? Pick up a few books. Watch some videos. Set a date. Let us know if we can help.
