THE FACTS OF LIFE
People are always asking the wrong questions about sailing around
the world. The most frequent question is how much it costs
to buy a yacht and do a circumnavigation. The second
question is about how much time it takes, and the third question
is about pirates and hurricanes. I understand why they ask
those questions, but there are other more important questions on
which they need to focus.
Questions like the following:
How many lives do you get?
If you aren't living your dreams now, when are you going to start?
How many years are you guaranteed to have perfect health?
How many years are you going to be alive?
These are the questions that really matter. It's easy to
forget the facts of life.
Here are the facts of life.
1. You only get one life.
2. Life is short and death is long.
3. There is virtually no reason that you should not be
living your dreams.
On the wall above my computer, I have a large chart that shows the
timeline of human history. It goes from neolithic and
paleolithic times right up to the present. It shows the
major empires that for a time spread across and ruled planet
earth. Some of those civilizations lasted for more than a
thousand years, and now they are gone. Billions of anonymous
people had their shot at life and then disappeared leaving hardly
a trace.
When I traveled in the Saudi desert, I sometimes found arrowheads
lying in the sand. The last person who touched that
arrowhead lived in neolithic times more than eight thousand years
ago. That arrowhead reminds me of the
shortness of life, and that I should be living my dreams.
Your short stay on planet earth is frighteningly brief. It's
like a puff of smoke or the flash of a meteor in the night sky.
The facts of life are very clear. Life is way too
short to not be living your dreams.
Go ahead. Live your dreams and make every day count for
something good.
Even though your life is short, there is no limit to how good it can become.
This particular patch of
paradise is at Conception Island in the southern Bahamas. We
are cruising in the company of Txai, a Voyager 440 catamaran
sailed by Brazilian adventurers.
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