Perseverance - The Long Game
Sea Years / Field Notes / The Power of New
The Promised Land Is Right Where You Are
Fire in the belly. Direction over speed. A life built one port at a time, mostly by sea.
Opening Signal
When you are following your bliss, it produces a desire to continue.
What good is having a belly if there is no fire in it? Wake up, drink your passion, light a match, and get to work.
Field Note 01
State It. Create It.
Enormous outcomes are usually the visible result of small steps no one saw.
We rarely see the incremental baby steps behind enormous outcomes. The art and science of achievement is turning something invisible into something visible. “I want to travel around the world” was the mantra I told myself every day for as far back as I can remember.
How did I do it? One port at a time, mostly by sea.
My universe is made of stories, not atoms: land, air and sea travel; the power of now and the power of new. If I wanted to become a multinational soul and leverage my best asset—me—I could not do it only in the cities where I had lived: New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo or Paris. I needed to be consecrated by the oceans, letting my soul and spirit fly into the mystic.
It is a wonderful thing to get rid of everything and go somewhere you know no one, where, as Melville said, God’s one and only voice is silence.
Rocky Mountain High
A field note from the journey beyond the familiar map.
Fiji Islands / Rocky Mountain High
Open the companion travel post.
Field Note 02
Ship / Shift Happens
Living aboard can be summed up as monotony tinged with hysteria.
The Scenery Paints Itself
I am just the middleman. You cannot create experiences like this; you undergo them.
Forest Logic
If a man speaks in the forest and there are no women around to hear him, is he still wrong?
Ship life is not real life so much as an alibi. It is like going out of your mind every day in order to come to your senses. A fool who persists in his folly becomes wise. If your ship does not come in, swim out to it. Success does not come to you; you go to it.
It is not easy getting a gig on a ship. The only easy day on board was yesterday.
The Greeks invented the idea of nemesis to show how a single virtue, stubbornly maintained, can gradually become a destructive vice. A vague love for everybody and everything has its moments. Fidelity to concrete relationships, people, institutions and places is harder—and more real.
Field Note 03
Fire in the Belly
Direction comes before companionship. Fulfillment comes before applause.
“There are two questions a man must ask himself: The first is ‘Where am I going?’ and the second is ‘Who will go with me?’ If you ever get these questions in the wrong order, you are in trouble.”
Sam Keen / Fire in the Belly
Steve Jobs said, “Money is life’s report card.” Sam Keen said, “Nice gets you a C+ in life.” This is the lesser-known “I don’t have a dream” speech. The first forty years of childhood are always the hardest. Growing old is not optional. Growing up is.
Good men and good women have fire in the belly. We are fierce. Do not mistake goodness for permanent niceness.
I have seen success become a drug of choice. Success without fulfillment is failure, yet this kind of failure often gives you your best material.
Choosing experiences and travel adventures over working away your life for material things is what college is all about—so why stop there? I am still happier when I spend money on experiences instead of material goods.
Field Note 04
Resourcefulness Over Resources
The sea turned my “can’ts” into cans and my plans into serendipity.
As an Art Director and World Cruise Coordinator, the experiences at sea turned my lack of resources into resourcefulness and leveraged my dreams into serendipity—a thousand unseen helping hands.
As I stated in my YouTube channel bio: no matter how low the budget bar gets, I always manage to limbo my way under it.
300 ports in 38 months.Money is not the root of all evil. Boredom is: a spiritual anorexia, the despairing refusal to be oneself.
The Privilege of a Lifetime
Being who you are begins when you release the life you planned and accept the one waiting for you.
I came to love this new self not by becoming a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly. Only by becoming intimately acquainted with our narratives can we begin to live consciously and, as Rumi said, unfold our own myth.
We live in a storytelling economy and get paid for the stories we tell. I am constantly writing and rewriting my autobiography in this blog, although I get paid in attention more often than cash.
Field Note 05
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly American
Being born in America can feel like being kidnapped and sold into entrepreneurship.
- The treadmill of consumption and materialism is a shared hallucination: a mask that eats the face.
- Being American is also like winning the lottery. It is a currency, and I wanted to spend it well.
- We value the material and often ignore emotion. If I wanted to serve my country, I first had to betray its default script.
“If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you.”
Joseph Campbell
What was the blue-chip idea worth betraying? What was the lie I told myself? It was the disease of more in a world of plenty. My blind spot was the loss of simplicity and the yearning for complexity.
The true opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom. I was willing to risk pain—culture shock—to make a boring life interesting. I reframed home as a feeling rather than a place, and travel as a verb rather than a noun. You have to do it.
I became a one-man National Geographic on an everywhere trip. I had to switch from tourist to traveler and adapt. Otherwise the journey would be karaoke travel: a cheap imitation of the best still to come.
Without risk, faith is impossible. My leap of faith was curiosity.
Field Note 06
The Power of New
The cure for ennui was simple: any place but here—and surprise me every day.
Tracy Arm Glacier
The world as classroom. The ship as moving campus.
A Graduate School “Seamester”
Study abroad in nomadic pursuits.
There was nothing conventional about the work ethic on ships. I was paid in cash, visited remarkable places, had a hotel room and six all-you-can-eat meals a day. When passengers behaved badly, a new group arrived every seven or fourteen days.
Once I no longer needed PowerPoint to explain my job, I had to ask what I was worth outside the W-2 world of nine to five.
Who does not love the sea? The beach is a place of healing and joy. Salt cleanses us. Sun embraces us. The ocean heals heart, mind and soul. Time no longer moves hour to hour, but mood to moment.
Yet the sea has never been friendly to me. At most, it has been the accomplice of my restlessness. There is no cure for this curiosity.
Television is an eraser. YouTube and Blogger are paintbrushes. My leap of faith onto ships was recreation, re-creation and reinvention. There are second acts in American lives—and third and fourth acts too.
Field Note 07
A Multinational Soul
Home is a feeling, not a place in the soil. It is something carried inside.
Life’s a beach in an ocean of ennui. That is the takeaway from Fiji, Tahiti, the Maldives and even Alaska—the Big Alone—where laziness can find respectability.
These islands are extraordinary within their limits, and their limits are extraordinary. Emotional algebra says one plus one can equal infinity.
Ship life can become a delicate shelter where everything is arranged: formal nights, shore excursions, shopping and bottled water. Then you read a book or take a trip and discover you were not living; you were hibernating on a cruise ship, walking the painted line.
When you are perpetually cruising, you are what you are right there and then. People do not have your past to hold against you. There are no yeses in yesterday on the road.
Tourist / Traveler / Transit Lounger
I know both sides because I am both sides: a tourist who does not know where he has been, and a traveler who does not know where he is going. I have not been everywhere, but it is on my list.
I thought college was the longest vacation I ever took. This graduate school “seamester” became a kind of study abroad in nomadic pursuits.
I meet, therefore I am: a multinational soul. The countries I visited and lived in became as eclectic and restless as the ports of call I inhabited for six hours—or, at most, three days.
Along with displacement, jet lag and culture shock, I became a product of a movable feast: a transit lounger forever heading for the all-aboard gangway by six.
The cult of the amateur wanderer is growing: global souls for whom home is a feeling, not a place.
The Privileged Homeless
Is a new kind of person created by a new kind of life?
Final Reflection
Anticipated Memories
We do not only choose experiences. We choose the memories those experiences may become.
I am not really choosing between experiences. I am choosing between memories of experiences. Even when I think about future vacations, I do not think of future ports of call only as experiences. I think of them as anticipated memories.
The Remembering Self
Hear It from the Oracle Himself
Joseph Campbell on following your bliss and recognizing the life already waiting for you.