Wanting The Super Yacht, But Navigating The Kayak

I actually live in an area of the world with a hell of a lot of Superyachts, and the sight of them usually makes me want to vomit.

I would much rather be in a kayak.

Luckily, that seems to be what I’m steering, according to Oliver Burkeman.

Let’s back up, first, though.
​

If you don’t know the book Meditations for Mortals, welcome to the club. Someone recommended it to me recently, and it happened to be ready at the library way before I expected. I picked it up last night, not realizing what it was about, or what I was getting myself into (a regular occurrence as I am in a kayak.)

What I found in the introduction and the pages preceding the first daily meditation, is that it’s a book about how to look at the world and your time with a new lens. Burkemen suggests, much like Alan Watts did, that when we focus too much on something, that focus actually makes us worse at that thing.

Instead, Burkeman invites us to let go of “sorting things out” and to grasp life from the mindset of a limited human being living a finite life, alongside other limited human beings also living a finite life, all bumbling along into an unknowable future.

We all have too many things on our to-do list, and even if we get them all done, more just comes along. It better to face the impossibility of it all, which in the end can free us. As we’ve become so attached to busyness as a badge of honor, that we’ve lost some of the meaning of our lives.

So what does this have to do with kayaks and super yachts?

In today’s meditation (Day 2), he makes the argument that we’d all love to be living our lives as if we were the captain of a super yacht. We can simply plug in our destination, and sit back and watch it play out in the calm, open seas of the Caribbean, or some other yachting destination. When we get attached to systems or schemes for improving ourselves, or improving our lives, this is our Super Yacht Captain persona wanting control and wanting it to be perfect.

While we’re fantasizing about the plush chairs and the lovely champagne in the super yacht, we’re really navigating, unsteadily in a one-person river kayak. Much to our dismay, the current is what’s really in charge, and our best and only option is to do what little we can to avoid the rocks and ravages of the riverbed. Sometimes that means paddling, sometimes pushing off, and sometimes praying. The best we can do is stay alert.

All of this reminds me of the WIN acronym in the book Essentialism by Greg McKeown. WIN stands for WHAT’s IMPORTANT NOW.

Burkeman put it this way:

The challenge, then, is simple, though for many of us excruciating: What’s one thing you could do today — or tomorrow at the latest, if you’re reading this at night — that would constitute a good-enough use of a chunk of your finite time, and that you’d actually be willing to do.”

​Remember, we’re in a one-person kayak, going down stream. We can barely see what’s around the bend in some cases. (If you’ve never done this, I highly recommend it, especially if you love control.)

If you noticed, last week I was unable to get past my Day 1 reflections on How to Decide . Life gave me a big reminder that I was alone in my kayak. From last Tuesday onward until Friday, I wasn’t myself, and I instead of steering my kayak, I had to beach it on a sandy shore I found, and wait for a moment when I could re-enter the water with enough energy that I wouldn’t smash into the rocks.

This week is thankfully better, but I also know now to put much faith into the vision ahead, because, my kayak is not much different from yours.
What’s your kayak asking of you today?

Not the best thing, just the thing. The practice of a thing.

Originally posted on Substack with comments.

Read Deeper Not Faster