Sailing into Life
Why Working Hard, Recovering and Reflecting Matters
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The icy wave looms over you and your mates.
“Tie ‘em sails down!” you cry!
Your crew-mates rush to get the sails in place as the howling rain batters the ship deck. The ship lurches as the wave hits but remains steadfast in its integrity. “Sails secure!" a crewman cries. The crisis has been averted for now but another will arise.
Days then weeks pass this way. With each passing day, the ship begins to wear and tear. Planks of wood groan & some fracture with each crashing wave. The once energized crew lies dead exhausted, attending to only the most dire of emergencies; there’s simply no more left in their tank.
Suddenly, a wave, no larger, no smaller than the ones before it, slams into the ship, rupturing the hull and sending you and your crew-mates to Davey Jones’s locker.
Consider this ship; it’s the SS You. The SS You & its crew are effectively everything that you are; it’s your mind, body and if you’re into it, soul.
When we’re out and about, in the midst of the doing of life, we’re in the storm. This is the time of action, of leaping from thing to thing. We solidier down, locking down the cargo & sails of our life by removing doubt and limiting our focus to what moves the needle. We cut activities we deem not productive out of our lives and prepare for the coming trials & tribulations.
With each crashing wave against the SS You, with each challenge, we can feel most alive. It feels like we are doing the important work, or experiencing what life has to offer, or fulfilling our potential. These storms are necessary, helpful even as it allows us understand how well we’ve prepared ourselves and to test the limits of our capabilities.
But the storm takes its toll. As we push ourselves, with our calendars booked to the brim, leaping from one thing to next, we begin sleeping late or reduced hours, skipping our workouts, or canceling meetups with friends. We miss out on a friend visiting town and promise to “Catch them next time”. The planks of our ship fracture and our sails get torn up; the SS You’s integrity weakens.
And, eventually there comes that next wave, no different from the rest, that causes the ship to break.
A throbbing back from too many hours at the desk and not enough movement. The death of a loved one we called too little or a sudden, unexpected layoff that leaves you with no grounding. An intense anxiety attack, a sensation of loneliness among a sea of people or such poor sleep that you’re chugging multiple cold brews during the day & wondering what’s got your heart pounding like crazy.
Hindsight is always 20/20.
Of course working long hours, sleeping little, eating a diet of processed food working a job with little to no movement, away from friends & family is unsustainable.
But in the moment? It never occurs to us that way.
And it doesn’t help that remaining in the storm, is glorified and validated.
“Worked all night.”
“Going off of 4 hours of sleep and on my 3rd cold brew of the day!”
“Skipped my meals today.”
Combine this with the infinite FOMO that comes with the buffet of endless experiences the modern world offers and the time limit of doing it all before you have kids & you have a potent mix.
Infinitely generated social media feeds, continuous catalogs of streaming shows, countless restaurant openings, hot job postings, offers from a stream of friends to hang out, many destinations to visit the bucket list before you “settle down ”, the list goes on & on. What emerges is a constant catching-up race that has no finish line.
I’ve seen too many people, from New York to San Francisco, get caught up in the demands of their jobs, the FOMO and status games & their health, relationships and creative aspirations suffering as a result.
What is the antidote to this?
“Land ho!”1
It’s returning to shore for recovery and reflection.
Here, the crew disembarks to make merry on the litany of bars strewn across the shore while the SS You is looked over and rebuilt in the docks. Fresh planks of wood are hammered into place and previously weak sections of the ship are reinforced.
Without recovery, we’re constantly beating up the SS You without a chance to restore the integrity of ship. Without recovery, all you’ve got is a sunk ship; mental, physical & social burnout.
People recover in a myriad of ways from spending a day in nature alone, to a night out on the city with friends. Personally, it’s quality time with friends, some time in the gym, writing, reading and getting 8 hours of sleep.
Can’t beat that.
And once the SS You is restored and the hunger for the sea returns among the crew-mates, you prepare to set out once more, in search of the storms to dive into.
But you quickly realize you have no bearings! What are you headed towards?
This is where reflection comes in.
If recovery is restoring yourself and renewing what was worn down (hammering planks into the SS You), then reflection is determining a) what have you done with your previous efforts & time and b) what do you want to do from here on out? (i.e. mapping where you’ve been and charting a new course)
Some questions to guide you may be:
What went well in my day/week?
What didn’t?
What gave me energy and what took my energy away?
From there, we can set better ways of looking at our lives and work on the things that matter to us.
For me, it’s each night that I reflect on my stormy day in the Productivity Planner (not sponsored, just a good structure). And, at the end of each week, I do a weekly review that strongly establishes what I am headed towards.
Without these times docked, away from the storm, we’d wear ourselves down without having any sense of really what was accomplished during the storms, what we weathered the storms for and what storms we want to tackle next.
We can easily dive into any storm we set our eyes on, wasting the efforts of our crew & the SS You. And in doing so, we become a ship with a captain asleep at the wheel, mindlessly going wherever life takes us; allowing others dictate what storms we face.
It’s by following this kind of default path that people can wake up 20 years later and realize that it isn’t the life they wanted. This restoration and reflection has everything to do with living a meaningful life centered around what you want (career, health, wealth, relationships).
Collectively, this will allow the SS You & it’s crew to take on the high seas once more, ready to weather the toughest storms, en-route to great treasures and riches.
-Kiran
Apparently “Land ho!” is one of three nautical terms used. There’s “Sail ho!” designating the sighting of another boat and “Man ho!” which mean’s a town has been spotted.
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Kiran’s Gems 💎
“The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. And I was aggressively indifferent to my work. “Jack Raines wrote an interesting piece on the pointlessness of some jobs.
“Words can only grope clumsily at the sensation of actually being in Tokyo. I could describe to you the experience of sipping artisanal cocoa in a quiet bar in Omotesando…of strolling through a silent park next to a shrine with cherries in bloom,…of standing in a quiet grove on a carpet of flowers while brand-new skyscrapers loom just beyond the tree-line.” Noah Smith’s take on Tokyo and how it’s the new Paris.
“Extreme enthusiasm in my personal experience is usually overcompensation for a lack of true commitment. Lasting interests are more valuable.” Minh’s writes on happiness & the myth of the feeling.