Hilton Head Island: from the past

I am presently rereading the journal from June and July, 2017, when I was back in Evanston after having sailed GANNET from Durban, South Africa to Marathon, Florida, with only two stops earlier that year.

Here are a two entries that I believe are worth posting again.

From Friday, June 9:

Evanston:  You give up your dreams

     

        I happen to be listening to Dave Albin singing, “Everett Ruess” which includes the line, “You give up your dreams as you get older, but I never gave up mine.” 

        ‘Dreams’ seems too vague and romantic.

        I never had ‘’dreams’.  I had purpose and plans.  

        If those dreams are of the sea, waves will rise and smack you cold in the face, as they have me a thousand times.

        Picture a solitary child, sitting in his bedroom, looking out over an overgrown field in the middle of a continent, longing for the thousand mile distant ocean.

        He reached that ocean, of which there is but one as the ancients knew, and he sailed and knew it as few others ever have.

        He grew older than he ever imaged he would.      

        “Almost dying is a hard way to make a living,” he wrote after almost dying every year for two decades; but even at a deafening and half blind seventy-five years he never gave up not his dreams, which he was too hard minded ever to have had, but his certainty that he was an original, fully aware that almost all original experiments are failures.
        He continued to live his life in uncertainly and risk, as all of us do,  not knowing if his life was a success or a failure, or even how to define those terms.

From Friday, June 23

        The NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, or NatGeo as it now calls itself in surrender to the apparently universal decline in attention span, ran an interesting article on genius in its May issue which supports many thoughts I have offered in this journal.  Among them that ‘genius’ like ‘superstar’ has no objective meaning and is societal judgement; there are only originals; if one is admired enough he or she becomes a genius; and that life is forty years long, roughly from twenty to sixty.  Charts in the article show productivity declines decade by decade and for most ‘geniuses’ ends by sixty.  Naturally Bach was an exception, and so was Giuseppe Verdi.  I try to be an exception to the forty year rule myself.  Luck plays a part.  Time and chance happens to us all.  And persistence and discipline even greater parts.  Few succeeded at their first attempts.  Simply, when you quit, you fail.  If you persist, you may succeed.

From Monday, July 17:

Evanston:  I liked it.  I was good at it.  I felt alive.

        Breaking Bad fans will recognize the words spoken near the end of the final episode by Walter White, under-achieving high school chemistry teacher, family man and cancer victim, turned killer and genius meth cook.  He is speaking about his life of crime.  But the words could be true of running marathons, playing the viola, painting, sailing, singing in a band, writing a poem, playing baseball and many other endeavors.

        I think that next time I am asked why I sail, I will say, “I like it.  I am good at it.  And I feel alive.”

———-

Today is Christmas Eve in the United States, Christmas Day in New Zealand and Australia and other countries on the other side of the Dateline.

I wish all of you a happy holiday season and a splendid 2026, although the numbers of these years are becoming startling.