Belly of the Whale

A Manifest of Emotions and Well-being

This spring has been strangely trying on my emotions. I really haven’t been able to get a good hold on them or understand what it is I have been feeling. I have felt confusion, mood swings, stress, lassitude, frustration. Why?
This lifestyle is so new and different; I myself have changed in so many ways, have had to make so many allowances, have needed to come to terms with new realities. I have had very little solid foundation to rest upon when I found myself worn out and exhausted. I am trying to build upon my dreams, upon myself—but still these things themselves are in ever flux. Who am I? What is my dream?

I know I want to work hard so I can accomplish something special, meaningful, beautiful. This is who I am. I will sacrifice all to serve this end. But the path to this end is often a mirage, a faint, a dead end. It is at the terminus of these dark, sad corridors where I have to summon the courage to turn around and start again.
I also am one who prizes all beauty above all things. Beauty is the only end in and of itself. Things are ultimately judged by their pure beauty. Love is beautiful itself and is nurtured by beautiful things. My goal in life is to fill my world with beauty and thereby love all things around me. The most beautiful life I can imagine is the one of accomplishing something of supreme beauty—this is my dream.

And what is this dream, this dream I try to follow with my conscious footsteps? It is alive and daily changes. It is constantly updating itself with the constant learning of experience and time. I feel that the more one understands anything, the more beauty he can find there. All hatred and dislike stem from misunderstanding. I don’t doubt many disagree with me here, but, for me at least, it is an absolute certainty. There is nothing I understand that I dislike, nothing that I dislike that isn’t vague or veiled.
So my dream in general is universal demystification. I want to learn something about as many things as I can encounter in the world starting with the self: inner to the outer. I want omniscience; this way I can love everything. First learn to love the self, then the world. By loving everything I can serve most effectively; by serving I can create beauty; by creating beauty I can further love myself and all things.
The best teacher for me is travel. The world is constantly changing, people constantly changing. Nothing remains in stasis. I have to be constantly aware, alert. This also serves my personality. I have a short attention span, learn quickly on the onset, then tire and become distracted. Travel keeps me at my peak. Travel is the only way to gain global experience. You can start understanding the difference between the “cultural” and the “universal.” You start to see the bearth of human experience in a way that you can’t ascertain from literature or the National Geographic Channel. Travel is fundamental.
Sailing is the mode. A sailor is only comparable to a mountain man—he must be a master of numerous trades and skills. He is an artist manipulating each of the various strings of his own existence. It is a marvelous thing. You could spend a lifetime learning but one of score of trades that a sailor has knowledge of. But, for this reason, the sailor is entitled an independence, self-sufficiency, and freedom second to few if any.
This knowledge is the same that grants one the self-understanding that leads to self-love. You learn what it means to be alive, what is needed and what is superfluous. Separating yourself from the structure of society shows true dimensions of your selfhood.
The dream is so far travel and sailing. I need also communion with nature and time in solitude. Nature is the sea but also still climbing and mountain exploration. I want to visit lands and bike along their roads and climb into their hills. This will offer me new sights and smells, but also keep my body healthy and whole. Spiritually, it can also become a ritual of supplication. At times I feel the need to offer myself up to the universe, but my body and life in a position of vulnerability to fate, to the elements, and see if I am fit or worthy to continue living in this manner. This communion my come in the form of a climb alone in the mountains or a storm at sea. I have always been allowed to come back, and doing so, I have always felt refreshed and cleansed; life is not a mere hologram; what I feel is real.
Yet there is more to life that an observance of it. One must create. I like to create smiles on other’s faces. I like to create relationships as vehicles for love and sharing of experience. I like writing and photography, ropework, music, and especially dancing. I like creation that isn’t involved with the conscious mind, but instantaneous, compulsive, passionate. Here lies the ultimate validation of the sanctity of love making in its highest form. It is at once the consummation of our deepest and most natural desires. It is self-fulfillment, but it is also our most earnest and heartfelt giving. Never will someone ever give so honestly, unabashedly and with such intensity and passion as when engaged in love with someone they love. It is the most wholesome worship of another being in the form of giving yourself wholly up to them. This, of course, is the ideal, but can and does see reality from time to time.
Another form of relationship is that of teacher and pupil. I hope to find the opportunity and passion to teach as I travel. It will offer me a positive place in the communities I visit and help offset the negative influences of tourism.


Now then.
This is what I am ever working toward. Years and years I’ve been marching toward these slow realizations. Years and years I’ve smiled in their slow realizations. So why now do I find myself troubled by seemingly minor confusions? Perhaps I am simply in a trough of the waves that flow through life, a natural up and down. I am down because people get down. But this doesn’t offer me much to learn from.
I am tired. I am tired of working all the time. I am critical of myself for not working harder. I am becoming comfortable in a community, making procrastination all the more appealing. (It is easy to work when you have nothing else to do.) Now I am hanging out regularly. It is fun, but at the same time, I don’t see it leading me to where I want to be going.
What is more, it is sexually frustrating. I have been flirting with closed doors. I then start questioning my behavior. It is going on nearly a year since I dated seriously. During the fall and winter this wasn’t a problem at all. I was surprisingly content. I was wrapped up in the time. But now those feelings for companionship have awakened. Why can’t I be happy alone? If I didn’t need women I would be totally content. But women bring me such happiness I can hardly describe. They are worth the discomfort in the end. The are beauty incarnate.
I haven’t been exercising enough, perhaps. My diet is still unstable. I haven’t been exactly where I want (in the boatyard as opposed to at sea). I’ve spent money because of it. I am hard on myself for spending money. (Vicious cycle.) It seems all my problems are vicious cycles: I love women: I am hard on myself for loving women. I love to work hard: you can’t always work hard, nor can you objectively be aware of how hard you are working, so I criticize myself for not doing better.

Amidst everything else, I am finding now that I am still insecure about my birth, the fortune I was given simply by being born with my name. I have a good family living in a strong country, imperialistic it may be. I was born healthy and then educated and loved. I’ve never been in want. I often work more out of a desire to work (a symbol of social stature) then out of need. To be blunt: I come from money.
This has been hard to accept. Six months ago I thought I had come to total acceptance on this natural reality. But now, in a lower point in life, I find it is creeping back into my insecurities. Everyone else around me works. Right now, I don’t have to. I work on my boat. I am not un-busy. Yet, somehow, through the influence of those around me, I feel like I should have a job.
This is socially influenced behavior and I know it. I should do what is right, not what those around me do. I am not them. My needs are different. If they were in my shoes they would do similarly and not feel a wink of guilt. Yet I don’t shoulder my fortune so easily. People compliment me on the work I have done, not mock me because I don’t have a job. In fact my good friends encourage me not to work if I can bare it—not the usual conformist “everyone has to fit-in” lingo I’m used to.

What I am afraid of is slowly deteriorating into lazy hedonism, letting my ambition and determination fade through slow decay, so slow I don’t notice but with hindsight. I am truly afraid. It would be so easy to be just another “yachty” sailing the seas, drinking stiff drinks in the shade, island to island, slowly becoming grey and ineffectual, incorporating more and more gadgetry to do his work for him. Hedonism can lead to a life of service, but is not a life of service in itself. It is an education and, at times, a vacation.
I am scared. A life of travel, adventure, and lovers is not enough—it would be a shallow enterprise. I would be a liar and a hypocrite if I were to undertake these things for the sake of pleasure and ease. The pleasure and happiness I gain from hedonism is validated by how I use the experiences to create something greater than myself. I must transcend.
But will I? Presently, my life is so good, all is so wonderful. I have full confidence in my own physical future—sailing, teaching, whatever else—it is this confidence that bares the seed of doubt. I am too comfortable, too sure of myself. I am prideful and pride is scary.
We are taught that pride is a mortal sin. But this is Christian ideology which, unfortunately is often self-serving. What does pride mean to me? I think it is often misunderstood and misrepresented. The one who most demonstrates pride does so because it is he who has none. His fearing that his inadequacy be obvious, he overcompensates with rash demonstrations of confidence. Conversely, those who appear most humble and self-effacing, I find are often the opposite. They are so sure of themselves and their paths that they need no external reinforcement whatsoever. Therefore they allow other people to have the last word or walk upon them, for they have nothing to prove and nothing to lose. Their self-esteem is not contingent on social factors.
Some people, of course, are the see-what-you-get variety. They are shy because the are unsure; they talk loud because they think they know. So what is the nature of my pride?? Did the pride of Oedipus blind him to his ominous fate? Should it have been otherwise?
Perhaps mine is the best: confidence with fear as its own balancing scale. With pride I have the ability to risk all things. My pride is love of myself—and this is an utter necessity; it is the ground of my being. Yes. I am damn proud to be who am I and to be doing what I am. I am fortunate beyond expression and am determined to utilize every resource at my disposal to build something magnificent.

One thing is undeniably true and sets me apart from the other “trustifarians” of the world: my undying allegiance is to the poor. I may have been born with the rich, but I will certainly die with the poor. In this knowledge I take refuge when I think myself weak because of my birth. My birth is beyond my control, but my heart is sound.

Do I feel any better about myself after writing this?? Have I re-explained myself to myself? Will all be right once I get back on the water and sail away from this wonderful place that I have perhaps become to comfortable in? Time, of course, reveals her secrets at her will. I still question what else I could be doing with my Saturday afternoon other than writing yet another manifesto in defense of myself. What a load or garbage!
My problem may be that I have difficulty accepting happiness and comfort now. I want to struggle forever until some marvelous epiphanic end, where I am happy all at once then I die. Isn’t this true creative vibrancy? I can’t come to terms with my own happiness. How strange!
No, right now my happiness is a mirage and an illusion. I am not self-sufficient yet. Not until I am can I truly relax and reap the pleasure of the lifestyle I have chosen. Now I am getting nearer to the mark. I need patience then. Wait, good friend. You are nearly there.
It is that I want it so bad. I want the world that I dream of and I am close, but I am still held up. The process is slow. But I have come a long way. I have grown along the way—it is coming true.