Blue Planet

It's Thursday night on board our catamaran ile de Grace, about 950 miles from Vanuatu on our way to Cairns, Australia. At this longitude, it gets dark at around 7:30 pm, and tonight a gibbous moon is just settling towards the western horizon. We're about 450 miles east of Australia, nearing the end of the first leg of our planned circumnavigation. The winds and seas are as favorable as we've seen: 15 knots directly from astern, and a gentle 4 foot swell that accelerates the boat, surfing down the slope of the swell, each 10 seconds or so. Last night, in similar conditions, we dodged rain cells that moved glacially across our path, north to south. Tonight, the fuzzy dots of galaxies, stars, planets betray nothing more ominous than a thin layer of cirrus clouds high over us. Westward bound.

With a following wind, astride the twin hulls of our catamaran, I feel like a kid on skis, being pulled by a giant kite across a lake so big it defies the imagination. The boat rocks back and forth slightly, the hulls dipping and rising, the bow lifting and then the stern as the folowing waves pass beneath us. Jennifer is asleep below; we're on a 4-on, 4-off watch system, and sleep comes quickly for both of us. We've been lucky on this passage, and we've been lucky on our entire voyage from Panama - we've almost always had the wind on our back, taking advantage of the trade winds that flow southeast to northwest in these subtropical southern latitudes. They say that gentlemen never sail upwind, and while my clothes and behavior might suggest otherwise, I am now proud to call myself a gentleman.

As the petrels and terns might fly, it's about 9,300 statute miles from Panama to Cairns, a huge sweeping great circle arc across the small scale chart I have on the boat. When we left Panama in early February, bound for the Galapagos and islands beyond, I had an intellectual appreciation of the Pacific Ocean's breadth. On many maps of the world generated for US schools, North America is centered on the page, leading to a classically distorted view of global geographic distances and perspectives. As we've sailed each of those 9,300 miles (and more, given our meanderings),and knowing that the Pacific Ocean extends roughly 7,500 miles north-to-south, I am reassured that there is a unfathomable volume of water and open space on this planet that keeps everything we do, individually and as a species, in perspective. Do the math: over 64 million square miles of ocean - larger than all of the land masses of the planet put together. All water all the time, in places 7 miles deep. We're a small boat on a big ocean.

In chemistry, there's a thermodynamic concept known as a "heat sink," an ideal abstraction of a material capable of absorbing all of the energy (heat) of a given chemical reaction. Such a concept simplifies the mathematics of examining these reactions, which tend to produce or require heat. In essence, a heat sink absorbs energy. The Pacific Ocean, integral to our global weather patterns through such well-studied phenomena as La Nina and El Nino, serves as a global climatologic heat sink, absorbing and emitting solar energy, fueling jet stream wind patterns, and supplying moisture for rain and clouds.

I have a different view of the Pacific Ocean's heat sink-like attributes capabilities, one more geared to its constant reminder that humankind may come and go, our institutions rise and fall, our foibles and magnificence wax and wane, but still the waters of this magnificent ocean will churn under a distant sun. I receive a brief weekly update on Washington DC's political machinations from a friend, and while they briefly arouse emotions of outrage, disappointment, and (very occasionally, optimism), I am sailing across my own personal heat sink where they rapidly dissipate. Even, truth be told, I am losing the tight emotional connection to the people, organizations, and communities I've left behind, both as a result of less interaction, but also, because this ocean has become a reservoir and reminder of deeper cycles and rhythms.

This letting go of things that once mattered dearly to me is not without precedent. However, this time, the letting go has been a more gradual transformation than the ones I recall occurring during my younger stints at sea. I first spent a year at sea, when I was just 20 years old. Then, I had completed my sophomore year at college, and needed to get away from a US Navy scholarship that threatened to choke my sense of independence (even as it paid for two years of education), and to realize that I might be happier in a world of ideas and politics than in a world of equations and science. I returned from that year committed to pursuing international studies and a more liberal arts education at the decidedly-science oriented university I eventually graduated from. After another year at sea at the age of 23, I returned to enter graduate school, changed my career interests to domestic studies and economics, met my not-so-future and still-present wife, and spent the following 25+ years creating and raising a family, working, and, sometimes painfully, coming to a clearer understanding of who I am and what I want.

Time and circumstance and good luck coincided in 2009 to let me undertake yet this third and more extensive sea voyage, this time with my best friend and partner of nearly 30 years, a voyage whose first leg is almost complete. Now, nearly a year in, I have begun to feel that earlier-experienced sense of letting go, a release that seemed to arise more quickly in those earlier voyages. We age, and our bodies and minds are less supple, becoming both less vulnerable and more resistant to the changing weather patterns around us. I don't mind this hardening of the soul; it takes more to move me these days, but once moved, I find the new places all the more rewarding. There's more to let go, and it's harder to separate the wheat from the chaff. At night, when my watch is over, I lie in bed reflecting on friends I've lost along the way, ideas I've left on the table, paths not taken. I mull over things I've done and not done, words said and unsaid. No real regrets, but lots of reflective learning: what's central and what's peripheral. At the age of 53, any letting go seems far more consequential than the larkish asides of my 20s. No clean answers this time around; that's the stuff of fiction and fairy tales. Nightly reflection, on an ocean rippled with phosphorescence and the white water of breaking wave tops, is probably the best I'll muster.

But I can say this: I dearly miss my immediate family, my closest friends, the mighty challenges of helping to guide people and organizations to common goals, and my day-to-day human interactions with smart, compassionate, curious souls. But here, on a small boat, on a big sea, with petrels and terns gliding and swooping inches above the waves, with the sinking moon backlighting the clouds atop the western horizon, I am grateful for this mighty ocean's ability to absorb the manmade noise and clutter of our daily lives, to serve as an emotional heat sink for our passing follies and fancies, and to remind us of our transient existence on this planet - this blue planet --- we call home.

Our families, our workplaces, our communities surely define us as human beings, but here, tonight, heading downwind under a starry sky, they are juxtaposed against an ocean, a world and a universe that moves to its own winds, its own currents, its own forces. Little things, little problems, little issues - they will all pass; other things matter deeply, profoundly.  The trick is giving oneself the space and time to decide which is which, away and apart from the noise and clutter of a world that tries to make everything matter.

For me, the central insight of this voyage might be this: It's not that nothing matters; it's that very few things matter, and that it's well-nigh impossible to tell the difference between what matters and what doesn't without leaving everything behind for awhile and being reminded of our passing insignificance by a massive ocean, a limitless sky, and the space and silence to reflect without distraction.

We arrive in a few days, to a new land and new experiences and, yes, clutter and noise. Perhaps, instead of asking this ocean to absorb the clutter, I'll begin to draw from it the peace and tranquility needed to maintain a sense of balance and perspective as we spend 4 months living ashore. I do know this: my son and daughter arrive in a month to spend a week with us. What can matter more than that?

--Jon Glaudemans