The Sea of My Mind
I’ve been journaling for several years now, transcribing my thoughts and memories onto paper like so many of us here do. Writing brings clarity to the blurry reflections floating around the sea of my mind.
Just like the actual sea, conditions within the mind change continuously. Recently, my thoughts have created a bit of a ‘confused’ sea-state. In sailing terms, this is when the swells, wind, and waves are coming from multiple directions, converging at once and jostling the boat every which way. The lack of a predictable pattern makes it difficult to navigate. In other words, the skipper of the vessel doesn’t know which waves to ride in this watery fight for dominance.
Tiger Lily sailing under spinnaker from the Virgin Islands to the Bahamas.
I find that my mind feels a bit like that right now. An endless number of dreams, business ideas, places to travel, lives to live! So many different directions they all could take me!
Lately, my journal has been failing me. It’s not bringing enough clarity and order to these thoughts. The dreams just swirl faster–currents changing direction and sending me halfway around the world within a single entry. Literally–one second I’m daydreaming of moving to New Zealand, the next I’m cycling around Europe…and in between each one of these infinite parallel universes, I’m sailing around the world.
That’s always been the goal, and always will be. I will circumnavigate by way of the wind one day, that much is certain! But in the meantime, I need a project of sorts. Something to guide me, ground me, and make me feel as though I’m moving intentionally towards something.
So, I’ve decided to write via a new medium and create something bigger than my journal.
Writing has always been an aspiration of mine. When I was thirteen, I decided I wanted to be a travel blogger and promptly began a Wordpress site to document my sporadic childhood travels. The idea of making a career out of travel sounded impossibly cool! At the time, I only ever wrote about trips–I suppose it simply never occurred to me to write about daily life, or that my daily life would become one endless trip! I did not see so much beauty in the mundane, as I do now. I wanted to have crazy adventures and see the world! I didn’t know that one day I would simply want to meet my younger self through my writing. Maybe I hadn’t yet mingled with the feeling of nostalgia...
As I got older, I strayed from blogging and slowly fell into the rhythm of regular journaling. Now, I find journaling serves two equally important purposes: to delve deeper into the present moment and to act as a time capsule of the past.
Three years ago, I created a personal brand, which I named Sea Earth Sail (more on that later). With a shiny new website to decorate, I of course felt inspired to begin blogging once again. Yet now, that too has slowed to a sporadically used platform. So goes the ebb and flow of creativity!
Which brings us here, to the beginning of my personal writing challenge.
Over the next undetermined number of months, I plan to post one entry per week. I’ll write short stories about my adventures afloat, musings on books or conversations with friends, excerpts from my handwritten journals, and maybe even some recipe snippets from the vegan boat cookbook I have in the works!
The goal of all this is to do something for me–to create something of my own that is lasting and meaningful. To lay the groundwork for what’s to come (and hopefully figure what that is in the process!). More than anything, it’s to document my life in complete, publishable stories, rather than the scattered bits and pieces I put in my journal.
I hope you enjoy these weekly glimpses into my little life at sea. I cannot promise what structure these journals will take on exactly, but isn’t that the beauty of journaling? One cannot know the future, most certainly not when one lives on a boat! This life of mine is subject, always, to the wind and weather.
I find that sailing makes a good metaphor for many things. The one I’ll end with here is this: sailing takes you places slowly (usually roughly at a jogging pace, to relate this speed to my land-people), nautical mile by nautical mile. The route taken is nearly never a straight line, and the destinations to choose from are endless–you simply can’t visit them all. There is also no single timeline or itinerary you must follow. Simply put, there are infinitely many right ways to sail and see the world. This is a bit how I see life in general. And thus, why my mind feels like it’s in this ‘confused sea-state’ at the moment–I am overwhelmed by possibility. A very beautiful problem to have, indeed, and one that I have no shortage of gratitude for! So, with that, I welcome you here to the sea of my mind.
—Phoebe :)
