After 20 years of staff writing for newspapers, editing, freelance feature writing and finally, God help me, corporate writing, I sensed a change was needed. Perhaps because at every business meeting I could feel individual brain cells jumping to their deaths. So my encore “Yes” began with a big “No.” No more committee-approved emails. No more “hitting the ground running” or “getting on the same page.”
In desperation (actually it was a kind of depressive trance), I wandered into the boating supply store near my house and finally woke up during a conversation with an employee. I had just said I wished I could find a job sailing, and he was saying he could get me one. I came stark awake. I asked him to say it again.
Three months later I was the captain of a boat full of Boy Scouts, doing weeklong voyages on the Chesapeake Bay. Two summers later, I was the commodore of a three-boat Boy Scout flotilla. Two summers after that I volunteered on a tall ship based in Norfolk, which ran outdoor education programs for kids. I had little experience sailing, and none at all on tall ships. But after the first days, I knew I’d be getting a lot.
Sailing tall ships led eventually to Los Angeles, California, where I worked up from deckhand to chief mate to captain aboard a tall ship that does children’s education programs. Somewhere along the line I realized that sailing alone didn’t thrill me. Sailing and working with kids somehow did.
Kids and people in general are so often told they can’t, I wanted to tell them they can.
I won’t talk about how running a boat gratified my need to have things my way and be the star of the show and an example of enlightened leadership, also occasionally enlightened despotism. But I will say, in my case anyway, sometimes you don’t know what you need until you get it.
And certainly I’d never have known I would do this as a job. Boat grunt was listed nowhere on the career-preference forms I filled out in high school. That’s the funny thing. I often feel my getting here was entirely accidental. But more often, I think I was led by something I didn’t understand and couldn’t describe. The true trend of the spirit? The inner demon?
My advice: Don’t discount any interest. If you sense an urge in some direction, just try it. I don’t have space to talk about the tyranny of fear, but trust me, it’s an illusion. Decide first what you want, then address the fear later. Also, a good coach is extremely valuable. She will hear the babbling of your disordered soul and know exactly what you mean.