Doldrums

June 12 2019

This friend

sailed solo across the ocean

on a young man's journey

to find himself.

At an age

he could afford to be alone,

unmoored from family

in his Old World home,

and not yet at anchor

amidst the rites of passage

of becoming fully grown.

But at some point

we all make landfall

and find a settled sense of place.

Setting out on the path

of manhood

or motherhood

or the burden of care,

when our sea legs are lost

and we forget the sting of salt

and each small perturbation of wind

matters no more.

While I have never been to sea

and can only imagine how it feels

surrounded by water

stretching out to the horizon

wherever I look,

the surface flat

the air heavy

the sails inert,

as if emptiness

weighed them down.

Becalmed

in the vast uncharted middle,

where it feels like forever

and you have all the time in the world,

that liminal space

where one thing ends

and something else starts.

As expected, when you're young;

the restlessness

the lack of direction

the failure to launch.

But just how long

hoping the wind picks up?

Emir Vidjen, my Croatian-Canadian friend and old paddling buddy, once told me about this great adventure he'd had. Who knew this unassuming engineer's quiet demeanour disguised such unexpected intensity and focus? He was reminiscing about that exalted sliver of life when, as a young man on the cusp of adulthood, he felt free, and could trifle with danger, and needed to test himself.

I imagine the hardest challenge of such solo travel is to be alone with yourself. At least for most people. I'm comfortable with solitude, and I'm good at living in my head, so maybe I would cope well. But enforced solitude is different than having a choice, so who knows. Being busy, of course, is the best distraction. But there is no busyness when the wind dies.

Anyway, I never tried anything so challenging at that critical time of life, when one transitions from adolescence to manhood. And, since then, I seem to have drifted, missing the usual rites of passage into adulthood. So now, closer to the end, I'm distinctly out of sync with my contemporaries. Developmentally arrested, one might say.

Lately, I've been acutely aware of this feeling: stalled, in the doldrums, vaguely dissatisfied. So a poem that started with an image of being at sea – the vastness, the sense of possibility, the awareness of how small one is – became very much about being “at sea”, and took the direction it did.

I hope I had a light enough hand with the nautical metaphor. Because it's tempting to get carried away, to show off one's cleverness.