Saturday, February 15, 2025
I've had the immense fortune of living many lives, I spent my twenties playing musician and artist, my thirties, programmer and long-distance sailor. For as far back as I can remember, I've always wanted to be a generalist, and I've never regretted it. Somewhere between natural inclinations, inspiration, influences, and some more direct forces, I've tried to feel at the changes in the wind and find my place in the world accordingly.
My late twenties happened when rent prices were rising at a faster pace than I could keep up with doing what I enjoyed, coinciding with a market saturated with affordable second-hand vessels from the aging boomer generation. So, two vagabonds with relatively few means and a bit of technology, could find a sailboat and travel the world, not long ago this would have been unthinkable without considerable sponsorship. This makes me wonder just for how much longer this door will remain open until distances grow further apart once again.
We read of the golden age of blue water cruising and find their voyages to be as irreproduceable as our own are to others, just nine years ago, mainly due to bureaucracy, depopulation, aging infrastructure and destructive weather events. Countries are growing more insular, the weather more erratic and dangerous, the cost of living siphoning people's capacity to escape its whirlpool.
The meaning of fitness is the capacity of an organism to survive.
At what feels like the tumultuous tail end of the anacyclotic cycle, considering this global trajectory, and our choosing this way of life, does not speak highly of our ability to plan against a changing environment and position ourselves favorably to it.
A decade of arts has given me a fervor to live and wanting to learn, a decade on the water has afforded me space to acquire some green skills. I spent near 40 years inside my head cultivating a place I liked, in circles where the body has always ever been the domain of vanity alone, thinking myself to be a generalist where in truth, only ever affecting a generalism of a highly specific sort.
It's a cruel twist that cognitive function decline is most acute on those around me who have exercised in all the ways of mind, but none of the body.
The philosopher's body also must be well prepared for work because often virtues use it as a necessary tool for the activities of life.Gaius Musonius Rufus