The future of life aboard?

Posted on February 27, 2010 by Nathaniel

It’s been an amazing few weeks for me; a bit of a crisis that resolved itself (as they always seem to) Not sure where it came from but it certainly turned things upside down. I wouldn’t be surprised if my 49 birthday last week wasn’t the precipitating cause, but then who knows? What I do know is I spent the last two weeks examining a lot about my life – relationships, the meaning of love, purpose, goals, and being.

I feel like a lot has fallen away through the process: a lot of old ways of looking at things, a lot of old baggage. I even had a concrete metaphor of this –the other day i was undoing my belt buckle and something fell with a clatter into the toilet. For a horrified moment I thought it was my new ipod, but it turned out to be the pewter belt buckle I bought around 15 years ago. This is a pretty massive thing: a little silly and stereotypical wolf’s head with a guy riding a Harley and the caption “Born to be Free”. The casting was titled “Untamed Spirit”.

When I first saw this thing I was in the process of throwing off a lot of old and stale ideas, going through my very own mid-life crisis. I had spent decades living according to “shoulds” instead of needs, and suffered accordingly. As I was making several changes in my life I saw this buckle, and knew I had to have it.
It is very worn, the edges rubbed smooth on successive pairs of Levi’s. This was the second time the buckled had fallen off as the wire that holds it to the leather has worn right through the pewter casting. That buckle has been a badge of both honour and purpose for me for a long time, reflecting my core value of freedom.
It is falling off because I don’t need it anymore, and because I no longer have the same core values. As soon as possible I will respectfully consign it to the depths.

It’s hard to know what I will get as a replacement. A buddy has given me a new one that shows a crescent moon winking at the form of a nude woman. It’s quite the pretty thing, but so overtly sexist that I can’t see myself wearing it. Not really any different from those trucker’s mudflaps that I find so offensive.

The first thing I’ve noticed that has changed is my attachment to Tracy. I’ve never felt more deeply in love and devoted to her. The fence sitting that has been part of my craving for freedom is over. You would think after 31 years of knowing her that my mind had been made up, but in my defence, my relationship with her has been the longest that I’ve stuck to anything in my life, and there were many times I felt the urge to seek distant shores.
But now we’ve started on a new and deeper approach to intimacy in our relationship, which only goes to show that no matter how long you have loved someone, there are still deeper and more terrifying levels to go.

Somehow I’ve become aware that “freedom” is really an internal phenomenon, and that keeping distant from others is not the way to go.

As well as surrendering an antiquated ideal of masculine independence, I’ve also surrendered a persistent fear of death. All my adult life I’ve been disturbed by the notion of the obliteration of self. It seemed to me that nothing could be worse and that life was in some ways a hideous joke, in that it must end in catastrophe for the same self that one spends a life trying to cultivate. It’s like dedicating your life to one fine, delicate blossom, knowing that in a few weeks frost will erase all evidence that it ever was.

But a new image of death came to me one day. It probably means nothing to others as my image came to me as an aspect of all that I have been –my beliefs, history, ways of thinking – but the image I get is that of a scaffolding holding together my ego, my consciousness. Upon my death the scaffolding will collapse and the ego will disperse. Whether I have a form of consciousness after that I have no idea but it doesn’t matter, as it’s only the ego that cares, and it will be dismantled.
I know my ego is not me. I have no concept or perception of what I truly am, but the question no longer disturbs me. I do know that all that I think and fear and love and doubt and believe is cultural, historical and biological, and so is contingent on time. When time ends for me, so does that scaffolding. I’m curious to imagine what if anything will be left.

I must say it is very freeing to dispense with the belief that what goes on in my consciousness is me. Frankly, most of that is just silly crap, and it won’t be a great loss when it’s all gone.

Tomorrow we move back to the boat. I’m very excited to see where my future takes me from here.

As a quick aside, I recently acquired an iphone and am posting this aboard a BC ferry in the middle of the Strait of Georgia. I found that it wouldn’t cost anymore to do all my internet and phoning through this device than when we had an ip phone, roger’s portable, and a cell, but would actually simplify things a lot. I get 500 minutes of daytime calling, unlimited eves and weekends, unlimited text, voice mail and call waiting and call display, and 3 gigs of data. an iphone for $100.00 bucks.

Boat co-operates for a change

Posted on February 20, 2010 by Nathaniel

I”m a little stunned. I had a big list of things to do and take care of, and one by one they just fell away. I went looking for that water leak and found at least one the first place I looked – right off the water pressure pump. Tightened that up and we’ll see if there are any other leaks. Replacing the regulator on the BBQ was a bit of a pain as it seems that crappy tire has changed the size of the fittings for their replacement regulators, as this new one wouldn’t fit. I had to drive all over town looking for a small length of threaded fitting to connect the regulator to the gas orifice. It was only after all this wasted time did I think to check and see if Dickinson sells replacement parts.
They do in fact, and I would have gone that route if I had thought of it. Most times I don’t even think of using OEM parts, because OEM is short for grab your ankles. In this case it’s only twice as much as the crappy tire part.

There were a few other things as well; i don’t really remember as the last few days have been a blur. I’m now starting to think about preventative maintenance, which really frightens me; generally the list is a mile long without looking for trouble. But I don’t think the steering cable has been replaced in many years (if ever) and that’s a cheap repair that can save an enormous amount of grief. But notice I said cheap, not simple. That’s gonna be a real headache, which is why I haven’t done it yet.

The Dickinson furnace started acting up again but that can wait until the fall, i’m thinking. That unit is badly designed; the electrical connection to the flame detector (for the flameout safety shutoff) is a friction-fit clamp. the heat cold cycles loosen the damn thing and then the furnace won’t stay lit. To tighten it back up you have to completely pull the unit apart to reach the clamp. Most safety shutoffs use a heat/pressure sensor and this is the first time I’ve seen an electrical one, and I’m not impressed.

Next week I’m heading outta town to do another floor. Sheldon and I are become experts at installing real hardwood flooring on cement – what you will typically find in a condo. In the past, people have generally gone with floating laminate floors, but the difference between real hardwood and plastic is striking. This new SIka Accoubond system is a fantastic solution, and it provides good sound insulation between floors, which is also often required in a condo.

Knowing what you don’t know

Posted on February 18, 2010 by Nathaniel

One of the difficulties I have in doing this blog – and in any other kind of public discourse – is that any kind of assertion or declarative statement is dependent on faith, my faith that was I’m saying is true. This kind of faith is quite rare in me, believe it or not.

Increasingly my blog is becoming focused on my own experience, rather than opinions. One reason is that if there is one resource the world is not short on, it’s opinions. Debate may be a good thing, but the cacophony of voices out there are so many, diffuse, and antagonistic, it is like one loud, continuous, unintelligible roar. The absence of my own would be no bad thing.

The other is that I’ve spent much of my life with my eyes and ears open, and I’ve come to understand that truth is much more approach and perspective than anything objective. So getting a real handle on anything is like wrestling a greased pig blindfolded. The longer I spend on this planet, the more I realise I don’t know squat, and neither does anyone else. In fact, the stronger I feel about something, the more suspicious I am of my own words.

Asserting anything is a real act of hubris, because it assumes you really know something, when all evidence suggest otherwise. It is very, very rare when I hear an assertion that I couldn’t reasonably follow with, “Perhaps, but what about…”
Even so-called objective truths, the falsifiable facts that science provides us with are very subjective in that they are limited by history and language. We don’t know what we don’t know, and we can only describe things in terms of pre-existing ones.

What can become troubling is even our own subjective states are very subjective. How we know ourselves is contingent on culture, language and history. How I describe my inner world might be very different if I was an Atheist or a Muslim.

Just recently my perspective on relationships has taken a major upheaval. I’ve spent a lot of time in counselling and doing counselling, and part of my worldview involves the notion of “codependency” that was so popular in the 90’s. The idea that closeness is good, too close is bad. Recently I’ve started Reading Sue Johnsons’ book Hold Me Tight. In this book she examines relationships from an attachment perspective, and unlike that earlier paradigm, she has reams of science behind her to back up her assertions.
I’ve been fascinated by attachment theory for many years, and focused on it while getting my art therapy degree. Everything she talks about makes sense from the perspective of attachment theory, what we know of primate bonding, human development, and my own intuitive experience.

Suddenly, a perspective that I have believed in and followed for many years, an approach that guided my own intimate relationships, is shown to be not only incorrect, but potentially destructive as well. I highly recommend her book.

The irony is of course that her theories will only stand until a better one comes along. It’s not that she’s “got it”, but that in all probability she is less incorrect than the previous model. Even the very manner in which we love each other is subject to changing times and ideas.

Now that’s not to say that you must therefore give equal credence to all possibilities; I am a very critical viewer and not easily persuaded. However, given adequate evidence, I love to have my worldview shaken up. There is nothing quite so wonderful as a new way to look at the old, to be given new eyes as it were.
But every time I write something down here, there are is a voice that says “Yes, but…”

A few images from Sunday’s sail.

Just raised the main…