When Constants Become Variables
Everything takes hard work. While I generally share the more glamorous moments of our life (the days where we explore a new shoreline in search of sea glass, or spear lobsters for lunch and surf the afternoon away) but in reality, we work all of the time.
A few years ago, I was intrigued by a headline criticizing Beyonce because she looked so amazing within weeks of giving birth to twins. The tone of the article was that she had sabotaged peoples’ self-images because she was so fit and radiant in such a short time after delivery; in a better physical state than many Americans at their peak fitness levels. I was amazed by the dozens of people that added comments to the article mirroring the author’s opinion without anyone recognizing how hard Beyonce must work to look the way she does. The glamorous woman that the public sees likely invests every waking moment into being a superstar and succeeds because she is fully committed to that dream. All of the hours of training that she puts into it must be grueling.
This realization was furthered by a Shovels and Rope concert that I went to a few weeks later. As I waited for the cover band to finish up their set, I heard a woman comment on how she would love to tour around with her significant other and play music for a living. The lights then dimmed and the duo took the stage. Their performance was excellent. After they played a couple of songs I could see the sweat beading up on them and sensed the fatigue of life on the road. I could see all of the late nights that they spent working on their act in lonely motel rooms. I could feel their weariness of driving from show to show, loading and unloading of their gear, the stiffness in their bodies from being in a car seat for so long, all of the desiccated gas station food that they likely ate along the way because it is convenient. While it is admirable that they committed to their music and pursued their career despite the obstacles, I saw very clearly how hard they worked to just be doing what they were doing.
That is why I feel like we are in good company when I stop to think about how hard we work to just be doing what we are doing. Because we have committed to living the life that we want to live, we are ready to work continuously to make it happen. I so often feel that the 9 to 5 jobs that I have had in the past were so much easier, but so much less rewarding, than being self-employed aboard my sailboat.
When we moved aboard Silent Flight a couple of years ago, we had an immense amount of work ahead of us. We didn’t have electricity for the first few weeks, and we also didn’t have a toilet for over three months. (We used in a bucket on deck, sometimes during fierce squalls, until we were able to get a new toilet shipped to us to replace the one that had broken months before.) We decided that we were going to jump aboard this dream and see where we ended up. Fast-forward two years, and everything aboard the boat works reasonably well and we have a very comfortable home. But the process to get here took dozens hours of filthy, sweaty, greasy, bloody, often frustrating work. When we tell people we live aboard a sailboat in the Bahamas, a significant portion of our lives is the furthest thing from what they imagine when they inevitably comment, “Rough life.”
And then there is work work, or how we earn income. Between Silent Flight Studios and the Exuma Naturalist Project, I typically start working on loose ends from the moment I wake up and throughout the day until I go to bed. But I love every minute of it.
Life is ultimately a balance between making concessions and deciding when to stand by one’s abstract principles. Now, as the COVID-19 health crisis continues to freeze the global economy, that balance has been completely toppled and we find ourselves scrambling to reestablish equilibrium in our lives along with everyone else in the world. Our online jewelry sales, which use to move with a steady flow, have all but dried up to an inconsistent trickle. Art shows and festivals have been canceled or suspended until further notice. We have also had to reschedule the environmental education programs that we had booked for The Exuma Naturalist Project. It seems that now all we have left are our abstract principles, and plenty of time to think about them as we sit in quarantine.
I must admit that I still find it daunting to contemplate how we will stay afloat in the coming months if this state of global paralysis continues. But I am finding reconciliation in that, while we can’t eat our abstract principles, our concessions don’t help us sleep at night. For years, we have been working hard to figure out how to live the life we want to live given the parameters of the world at the time. Now that so many things that we used to treat as constants have recently turned into variables, all we can do is continue to work hard at living the life we want in this time of shifting baselines.
We are far from alone in having to adapt to this new world we now inhabit. We are all going through this learning process together, and we will all succeed in reinventing the lives that we want to live despite the challenges that we are now facing: it will just take consistent, deliberate, and sometimes hard work.
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