The boredom in offshore sailing

People have always a lot of questions about sailing. The most frequently asked I believe is the one that tries to shine a light on why one spends a long while out of touch, traveling slowly through a deserted place aboard an uncomfortable vessel.

The question comes in many forms, and I think the following blunt example is a good one: Don’t you get bored out there in the ocean?

Sooner or later everyone who seems to enjoy longer offshore sailing becomes the recipient of this inquiry, as the use of this uneconomical and obsolete form of transportation puzzles the majority of non-sailors.

The question throws me a little off every time, but I have been asked it often enough that I developed a set of responses.

At first I try to describe the experience of crossing an expanse of water by exalting the fact that the ocean is never really the same and every wave that comes and go, every cloud in the sky, lightning, fish jumping or bird gliding is a gift of an ever changing earth.

If that does not do the job, there are some iconic examples I throw in to illustrate the attractive of ocean sailing, i.e. how spectacular and inspiring is to witness the darkest nights unveiling our vast universe, or the poetic and astounding reflection of the moon on the black sea, images that invoke the feeling of being in connection with nature, a nurturing experience that grants access to a sense of cosmic fulfillment.

Then I surrender and admit that yes, it’s pretty boring out there.

SAILING IS BORING

There is nothing to do, you are too far away from the coast to check Facebook or Twitter, shuffle around shows and movies, you can’t really call anybody as it’s way too expensive, you can’t buy anything nor read the latest news on your favorite topics, or any topic, and the beauty of the environment can and will get shadowed by its monotony.

I can sympathize with non-sailors’ bewilderment, as I recognize it’s a behavior so very hard to understand. Why would anybody undergo this deliberate exposure to boredom?

Well, one reason could be the sense of accomplishment. If the voyager wants to reach the intended destination which sits across a long stretch of water – conventionally sailing a boat from point A to point B – the boredom of standing watch hour after hour, day after day, week after week becomes a necessity.

The goal itself must be so rewarding that the atrocity of the experience surrenders to its intrinsic reward, otherwise soon enough something more entertaining will take over. Flying is also a more convenient way to achieve the same result.
This may explain the motivation of a certain type of goal-oriented sailor that value the discovering of a new place, but it does tell nothing about who truly enjoys being out there for an extended period of time in solitary confinement.

This second type of sailor may respond better to the argument that sailing is so good that every minute is totally worth it. During an ocean passage there is very little actual sailing happening, with the main tasks consisting in watching the boat doing its job. It is more or less like driving a car with cruise control on a straight highway with no traffic.

The experience and the work to sail a boat change with weather conditions. Storms and other natural fluctuations give a momentary burst of adrenaline and actions, sails gets changed or furled or reefed, to an otherwise monotonous overall experience. Even in the case of the crazy sailor who seek to sail in year long stormy places like the Southern Ocean,  a situation of normalization takes place and the stormy weather turn into the only reality, dull and repetitive.

French ocean voyager Bernard Moitessier once wrote; “I hate storms, but calms undermine my spirits”. Not very many people can claim to be more at home on a boat in the ocean than the French sailor, who once, out of disgust for celebrity and maybe society itself, did an extra half a lap around the globe after pulling out of the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race he was winning. But even Moitessier, apparently, was challenged by boredom at sea.

Single-handed sailors might get the full deal, but other crew member don’t necessary become source of relief, as soon as the days pass, the arguments and stories become trite and superfluous to the point that silence becomes preferable.

Early existentialist Søren Kierkegaard pointed out a while ago how company is not alone sufficient to contain boredom:

“Adam was bored because he was alone; therefore Eve was created. Since that moment, boredom entered the world and grew in quantity in exact proportion to the growth of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille. After that, the population of the world increased and the nations were bored en masse.” Either/Or, 1843

In a sense, offshore sailing becomes a perverse activity as the seafarer would deem a passage successful when there is as little intervention as possible. Uneventful becomes the highest grade allowed for judging an ocean passage. For exciting and action packed sailing one should look into afternoon sails in a busy bay or taking part in a club race.

Another objection to the fact that sailing is not so boring in the end, is that on a sailboat there is always a job to do, either because every activity is difficult and takes longer – every task has to be accomplished while simultaneously hold onto something – or because things tend to break quite regularly. Even when no immediate action is required there is a lot of preventative maintenance and routine checks to keep you entertained and busy.

But boredom still gets you in this scenario, you don’t feel like working all the time as it’s true in many different settings in life. Checking and tightening that bolt again, or making sure that valve does not leak soon becomes very tedious. Procrastination finds its prominent role even in the middle of the ocean, and having nothing better to do does not seem to act as motivation to keep you busy.

There is not need to cross an ocean to embrace such experience. A 48 hours passage can be dull and uneventful enough to provide some serious boredom and challenges.

During many miles at sea, the mind focuses obsessively on the destination even when there are still miles to cover, or indulges in considering past events, problems, ideas, injustices, hatred, remorse a collection of forgotten episodes of life that come back in wave trains. Self-examination becomes unavoidable and open the doors to some very uncomfortable thoughts and feelings.

American author Robert M. Pirsig who struggled with mental health throughout his life, had tried sailing crossing the Atlantic twice on his Westsail 32, and leaving behind a brief and exemplary short essay written for Esquire in 1977.

As one lives on the surface of the empty ocean day after day after day after day and sees it sometimes huge and dangerous, sometimes relaxed and dull, but always, in each day and week, endless in every direction, a certain understanding of one’s self begins slowly to break through, reflected from the sea, or perhaps derived from it. “Cruising Blues and Their Cure”

BOREDOM IS GOOD

I understand this is a blog about sailing, and that maybe a long dissertation about boredom may not be of general interest. Going a little deeper in exploring the relationship between time and boredom may help in the end to underline the totally boring character of offshore sailing, and why it makes it so good and sought after, at least by a small group of dedicated people.

I am also tired to give fake answers about starry skies, moonlights and ever changing waves, and I am myself looking  for a better explanation.

My biggest surprise when I set to write this post, is that there is a ton of material online about boredom, some coming from the most brilliant minds that had ever stepped on this planet.

Contrary to common sense, boredom is also hip, boredom is cool. The wishy-washy entertainment and news publishers make boredom look not boring at all, worth to win a click by a bored audience. Apparently among the benefits of boredom I found that enhances creativity, promotes pro-social behavior, and changes of behavior in general.

But the greatest help in understanding boredom’s realist and mechanics comes from extremely boring people, philosophers and authors in general, people who spent a lot of their time escaping boredom and pondering about stuff.

Martin Heidegger is probably the author who dedicated most pages to the topic. Trying to summarize (and banalize) the German philosopher’s conception of boredom it would sound a bit like: I am bored, therefore I exist.

He makes the example of waiting for a train: In doing nothing on the platform, without distractions saving from the passing of time, boredom becomes so evident that acquires almost physical substance. What in reality is happening is that we are experiencing time itself, which for some reason we are not equipped to understand or dominate. It is also curious that in his native language the word for boredom, Langweile, literally means “ a long while”.

Without boring you too much, Heidegger strongly believed that boredom was the perfect way of access to “the essence of human time”, which access could lead to “waking up to ourselves”.

Luckily commuters who use trains often learn how to cope with this sensation and become better and better in absorbing its impact. However most of it is in reality just cheating. A book, newspaper, the smartphone, mp3 players and such, all avoid rather acclimate us to the feeling, contributing to strengthen the allergy to boredom. All this Heideggerian “waking up to yourself” is rejected completely by contemporary commuters.

For the severe moralist Bertrand Russell, the more we escape this fear the more difficult is to develop a character. The British philosopher,  who also did some prison time, considers boredom something that toughen you up:

“A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow process of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers as though they were cut flowers in a vase.” Bertrand Russell

In this inability to withstand the attack of boredom, he sees the danger of excitement, of consumption of objects and experiences that make people more and more desensitized and also exhausted, as the search to increasingly intense forms of excitement is never ending.

Raw time doesn’t bode well for people, and at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it, or better said by it’s avoidance. It is also the case of being busy no-matter-what, which is incredibly easily exploited. This was the opinion of home-schooled French mathematician Blaise Pascal who famously wrote in his Pensées:

“All of humanity’s problem stem from man’s inability to sit quiet in a room alone”

Despite all our efforts boredom will find a way in. It will make binge watching TV shows tiring and dull, reading another page difficult, going out for a beer with friends the same old story. We can escape boredom only to a point.

Russian-born Nobel Prize Josef Brodsky dedicated a whole commencement address at Darmouth College to the topic of boredom, in which he encourages to embrace it, go through it, to hit the bottom with it, instead of making the research for alternatives a full-time expensive activity.

“[boredom] is your window on time’s infinity. Once this window opens, don’t try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open. For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson of your life- the lesson of your utter insignificance” Listening to boredom, 1995

Academics tell us it is important to deal with boredom, but its consequences are dire and unpleasant. Boredom deprives us of basic emotions like fear, joy, anger, delivering an internal landscape of vast platitude and deafening silence. We resort in looking outside for a stimulus, something to grip on to be carried away to a more pleasant, less empty reality, even watching season two of Westworld becomes entertaining, while in reality it’s a dreadfully useless show.

This is the power of boredom. It’s a reset, a cleanse, an update of meaning bestowed upon us by the meaningless time.The deprivation of stimuli forces the mind to stay awash in the passing of time, it gives us back control on our own mind, which can be consciously directed, instead of followed unintentionally to the next source of excitement.

SAILING IS GOOD

Sailing is seen as an escape from the monotony of the rat race, and while novelty and excitement will improve mood and lookout on life in the short term, soon an even graver monotony and inescapable boredom will creep in.

Paradoxically the biggest lessons I got from offshore sailing came from its boring parts.

When I am removed from the media pipeline, the joys and miseries of human contact, and I’m confronted with the indifference of nature I have little that shelters me from face-to-face encounters with boredom. The day and what to do with it is my responsibility, so it’s where to direct my mind. Control is still an option, it becomes the only option.

Matt Rutherford which I interviewed for Psychology of Sailing, described his attitude during his solo Round the Americas when he spent 309 days non stop at sea. He said that during the exploit he consciously tried to be in a sort of middle zone, a mental state that would not bring him too high in the joy realm, or too low in the upset pit:

I got bored out of my mind crossing the Atlantic at one point during both trips. You don’t want yourself go in a certain place mentally. You don’t want to be in extreme joy because if you do you can open up the doorway to extreme depression. If you go in one direction then the pendulum will swing both ways. I was trying to stop the pendulum staying in the middle. It’s a bit of a blasé attitude you accept that whatever happen happens. You have to be very accepting, accept when things break without being too upset, and be thankful when something good happens. Matt Rutherford

Offshore sailors go through the troubles of hard work, organizational hassles and costly preparation to experience days of unobstructed contact with time, almost impossible to replicate in other settings where a minimum of involvement with Society is required.

Many who love this activity feel at ease in that setting, and they look forward to it. The ocean is a space that cuts off from both what it had been and what it will be, where monotony becomes a resource, and where time is abundant, eternal, infinite. It’s a great opportunity to learn how to deal with time, rather than fill it in.

 

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RESOURCES:

 

Martin Heidegger:

• Heidegger, M., (1983)The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,
  
• http://janslaby.com/downloads/slaby_heideggerboredom.pdf
• https://philosophynow.org/issues/65/Bored_With_Time

 

Kierkegaard:

• Kierkegaard (1843), S., Either/Or,
• https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/01/14/kierkegaard-boredom-idleness-either-or/

 

Bertrand Russell

• Russell, B.,(1930) The Conquest of Happiness, 1930,