Tag Archives: Mid-life

A Tragedy, and a Promise

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If you do not regularly follow news of the ‘sailing community’, you may not have heard about the recent very tragic death of experienced sailor Jan Anderson from San Fransisco. Jan and her husband Rob were sailing on their Island Packet 380 ‘Triple Stars’,  in the North Atlantic Rally for Cruisers (NARC) which started in Rhode Island on November 1 and ended in St. Martin. The weather this time of year in the North Atlantic can be troublesome at best so a good weather ‘window’ was awaited before the group cast off.

It sounds like all went as planned until an unexpected low pressure system off South Carolina traveled south and created a front with 40 knot winds and 20 foot seas lasting several days. Many of the faster boats had already reached Bermuda and safety, but several boats were caught in the really bad stuff.  The Andersons had to heave to and try to ride out the storm. They made the best decision they could with the information they had at the time and posted to their blog during the storm that they were prepared to ride it out and were in good spirits with plenty of supplies. These people were not newbies. They were experienced sailors on a good, solid boat.  Even so, Jan was washed overboard by a 30 foot wave, never to be seen in this world again. Her husband notified the Coast Guard. He was rescued. They searched for Jan. Their beautiful “Triple Stars” was abandoned to the sea. It’s one of the saddest things I’ve heard in a lifetime of hearing sad things.

After reading the news about this tragic death, I immediately wanted to know so many things. Don’t we always try to understand tragedy logically, so we can control whether it will happen to us or not?  I guess I’m just human on this point. So I wanted to know if she was wearing a life vest. Was she wearing a harness that was meant to keep her on the boat? Was it in good condition? Was she on watch single-handing it? Or did she leave the cabin ‘just for a minute’ to check something? We still don’t know the details, but I’m sure they will come out in time. And I plan to learn from them, as do many sailors around the world looking for updates on this each day.

While I wait for further news, here’s what I have learned so far, and what I hereby promise to my family and friends: I promise that when Mike and I are in bad weather on our boat, we will always wear life preservers and be harnessed to the boat with harnesses that are in excellent condition and that are meant to withstand many thousands of pounds of load. When keeping watch alone, we will be harnessed to the boat so that neither of us will ever have to come through the hatch to discover the other one gone. That’s the best we can do. Maybe it’s what Jan did.  The ocean is a powerful force.

Does this story make me second-guess our plans? Does it make me afraid to go cruising? Absolutely not. People are killed every day on the highway, and yet I drive my car. People die in plane crashes, but I get on the plane. Some things we have no control over in this world and I don’t have time to worry about things I cannot control. But I can control whether I have on my safety equipment. And I can control what kind of boat I have and, to some extent, my knowledge about bad weather that’s coming. After that, I take my chances. Just like I do every day when I get out of bed and leave my house. I take my chances. I’m not willing to live my life in fear.

What this story does is remind me not to be glib. Sailing on big oceans is serious business and we haven’t done it yet. Not really. When I think of 40 knot winds and 20 foot waves, our little jaunt to Barkley Sound hardly counts.  I think we will enjoy blue water sailing, even with difficult times. But it’s possible we won’t and we’ll just decide to come home. (Don’t hold your breath. It would have to get very bad very fast for that to happen.)  I know we need more heavy weather experience. And the only way to get that is to get out in heavy weather. (Winter is coming…)  It reminds me yet again that I want to be able to completely trust the boat I’m on. It reminds me to be careful, stay aware, and not to take the sea for granted. And it is so terribly, terribly easy to get comfortable on the boat and take for granted the solid feel of the deck under your feet. And the story reminds me how very much I rely on my husband, not only on the boat, but every day. And how much I love him.

But mostly it reminds me that life is short. And it doesn’t get any longer, either.

As tragic as this death is, I have to believe that Jan died doing something she loved with someone she loved. I have to believe, too, that her death was quick and merciful; that she didn’t have time to be terrified. These beliefs protect me from having to think about the full force of this loss, so I’ll keep them, thanks. And I have to think that people will be able to use whatever knowledge her husband has of this accident and learn from it and benefit from it in her name. I know that each time I see my life vest and harness hanging close to the hatch, I will forever think of Jan Anderson, even though I don’t know how she was washed away. They will remind me nonetheless. When we’re out in bad weather practicing in the relative safety of Puget Sound, I will think of Jan Anderson each time water splashes over the bow.

Jan, if your soul lingers, I’d like to say I wish I had met you. You’ve taught me so much.

 

Collecting Furniture: One Family’s Story

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Living Room Furniture

The velvet chairs, an antique oak coffee table, and my mother's buffet.

We have a problem here at The Cunning Plan household. This is going to be a sticky one, taking all of my resolve and much of my energy in terms of putting the proverbial money where the mouth is, if you get my drift. I may have to rely on Mike for strength. To be succinct, our problem is that our daughter,Claire,  is moving home for awhile as part of her own cunning plan for the future. It’s not what you think. This isn’t a ‘rebound kid’ situation. She has a great job and is a fully formed grownup. We welcome her back and look forward to having her. But not her stuff. We don’t look forward to her stuff.

Actually, to be brutally fair, it’s not really HER stuff we’re not looking forward to. Oh, sure, there will be the usual transition time where we all learn to live differently in the house once more and people wrangle for personal space for their belongings (NOT in the middle of the sitting room, okay?)  But we’ll get through all that. After all, we’re all adults here. The real problem is that she is bringing home more of OUR stuff in the way of furniture. Claire has the most adorable apartment in the world. It’s in an old Victorian house, has a bay window, hardwood floors, and an exquisite little fireplace. And it’s almost completely furnished with our furniture. Ouch. She’s going to be bringing an apartment full of furniture back home. Do I need to explain this further?

How does a mild-mannered family of 4 collect this massive amount of furniture (asks the curious reader)?  Here’s the gist of that:  Mike and I have been married for almost 30 years. Most people collect a myriad assortment of furnishings over that amount of time. In addition to the sheer number of years, I have a tendency to be somewhat…’creative’. Yes. That’s the word. Creative.  And while I love really good, solid furniture that stands the test of time,  I am pretty frugal when it comes to purchasing furniture. Okay, fine! I’m cheap when it comes to purchasing furniture. There is something about putting down several thousand dollars for, say, a couple of chairs, that just gives me pause. I’m getting better about that as I get older, but for the greater part of 3 decades I have had an alter ego that has landed us in this mess. Who is this alter ego, ask the inquiring minds among you? Melissa White: Furniture Stripper!

So much of the furniture we now own are pieces that I found for almost nothing at a rummage sale, or thrift shop, or the like and then nursed back to life. Pieces like the solid maple gateleg table I bought for $25 when Claire was about 5. It had several layers of paint on it. I stripped it, sanded it, stained it and painted the legs black. It’s beautiful. Or how about the solid maple dressing table with Queen Anne legs that I bought from someone for 20$ when Claire was 3? It’s heavy as all heck and has graceful lines. Again with the stripping, sanding, staining. It’s a fantastic piece of furniture and has been used as her dress-up table, my desk, and a sofa table over the years. It’s very versatile.

Then there are the two overstuffed chairs with rolled arms I bought because I knew they were quality pieces. I paid the best upholsterer in town to do them in taupe velvet. They are classic. I probably cannot buy chairs of this quality anywhere. And there is the very old steamer trunk I bought when I was in highschool. It was my first ‘antique’. I refinished the wood on the outside, wrote my name on the inside, and took it to college with me.

More furniture

One of the many upholstered pieces I've resuscitated, and old chest that will likely go, and a corner of the steamer trunk.

This is only a small sampling of the pieces I must decide about. (Oh, those velvet chairs are staying. Let’s be clear about that right now.) So much of our family’s history is represented in these pieces. Many of them I bought when the children were young. We couldn’t afford to buy nice furniture without going into debt, and we didn’t want to do that. But I wanted nice things. So I became pretty good at something I enjoyed anyhow. And we ended up with a home filled with priceless pieces that are personal and lovely and somehow make our home warmer than new furniture ever could. I have an oak dresser that belonged to my parents when they were first married. I have two large book cases that my mom got in the early 1970’s. I have a solid wood buffet that my mom got when I was a young child, now refinished with funky green glass handles.  I grew up with those pieces, and they are really nice. I would choose them again today. They are irreplaceable. How could I possibly part with them now? These choices are going to be really hard.

I had a dream a few nights ago that I was back in college somewhere and someone had stolen my bike. I was late to class and arrived pushing a shopping cart with only one item in it: a bike lock. I pushed that cart across the front of the class, in front of the teacher, and then all the way to the back of the class before being seated.  That dream is pretty clear to me. I do feel as though I am learning new and hard things, lessons for which I am only marginally prepared. I have no idea how I’m going to get from one “class” to the next, as though somehow I’ve been too cavalier in protecting what is mine. I am left with the lock, but my bike is gone.  It’s apparent that between releasing myself from the ownership of things that are intimately entwined with my personal history and publishing this blog to share that process, some part of me is beginning to feel like a homeless person on parade.

I know this feeling will pass. I realize it’s all a part of the process of letting go. But I’m reminded, once again, that reading about something is so much easier than doing that thing. So Peter Walsh, if you are reading this blog (as if…) please be gentle with me. Because I’m not going to promise that I can let everything go in one fell swoop. Maybe there is a reason why this is a 4 year plan.

 

 

Imagine the Life You Want to Live

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Preparing to Purge: The staging area.

As a psychotherapist I spend a lot of time asking my clients to imagine what their lives would be like if they made the changes they want to make. I ask them to imagine themselves living this new and improved version of the life they have.  I’ve spent much time myself imagining the kind of life I would like to live in the future; where I would go, what kind of boat it would be on, what it will be like swimming in warm water and living where the sun shines. Being warm.

None of this prepared me for reading the question in Peter Walsh’s book It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff, the book I’ve chosen as my guide for the Great Purging.  He asks people to imagine their ‘ideal lives’. When I imagine my ideal life, the dreams always seem to include leaving my home and going somewhere else. And that probably tells you something about me. But that’s not what Peter is after. Peter wants people to imagine the ideal way of LIVING in their Current Home! WHAT THE F..?  I never once considered that question in terms of HOW I am living in the home I currently own. It was a jaw-dropping moment  when that hit me, I assure you. I had to have a long bath in order to recuperate.

No one has ever accused me of being organized. Creative, yes. Free-thinking, yes. Attention deficit disordered, yes. Organized? Definitely not. It isn’t that I don’t try. I have invented more systems for getting our stuff organized than I can count. But they never seem to last. And now, thanks to brilliant Peter, I know why.  It’s because I’ve always been focused on “the stuff”, as he says. This man, in one simple paradigm-shifting part of his book, (the Introduction, for those of you who are reading along) completely changed the way I think about clearing out all the stuff that clutters up our lives.

He wants me to imagine things like being able to find my keys, having decent work flow in the kitchen, and being able to sit down to a meal at a table without clearing it off first. He wants me to imagine flat surfaces that exist for their own sakes, a closet where clothes can breathe and I can find things I like and that fit me. He wants me to imagine living in my house free of the stress that comes from having to constantly negotiate the amount of clutter just laying around all the time, with no real place of belonging. It isn’t that I haven’t thought about and wanted those things. It’s just that I have not actually imagined what it would feel like, or how it would ‘look’ if life flowed that way at my house.

Peter wants me to imagine what it would be like if I had been able to move into this house with intention, being thoughtful about where things go and how things are done and then keeping those systems in place. This is the opposite of our move-in experience.

Eleven years ago we moved into this house on a holiday weekend. The house was a ‘fixer’. The only updates it had were done by the previous home-owner who apparently had no idea what the term ‘square corner’ meant. And it was filthy. I mean it. When my kids took showers the walls in the bathroom leaked nicotine from all the years of the previous owners’ smoking. It was just disgusting. It looked like the bathroom was haunted. Every wall in the house needed to be sanded, sealed, and repainted, including ceilings. We had to demolish the family room (one of those home-owner specials) and have it rebuilt. We had the master bathroom enlarged and the kitchen updated.  I’m pretty sure our kids hated us for at least the first 6 months as we all slept together on the floor of what would be the family room. It was the only room I could get reasonably clean.

During the remodeling years, (yes, plural) our things got shifted from one room to another. We lived in the house one way, and then lived in it another way, until the remodeling was finished. By that time we had collected more stuff and still had no system for living in the house. Kids grew up, went to college, came home, left again. These are the times when systems should be able to flex and change to accommodate new patterns of living. But if you don’t have anything solid to begin with, it’s pretty hard to get it to be flexible without the whole system falling apart. My attempts at organization were futile. Now I see that part of the problem is that I was always focused on “the stuff” and where to put it in the tiny closets. According to Peter, this will not cut the mustard.

According to Peter, if you focus on the kind of life you want to lead, getting rid of the stuff in your way makes more sense. So, accordingly, my wedding dress is now hanging in the garage with loads of other ‘stuff’ that is in the way of my living the life I imagine. The dress is in good company with stuff like the old sealskin coat from the 1930’s that I bought for 15$ when I was in highschool, two sets of china that are lovely but that I’ve used maybe twice in 10 years, and funky American pottery planters from the 1940’s that I used to collect and that now collect dust.
But what about the cool old Villeroy and Bosch majolica plate with a gnome on it? I love that thing and it’s so… me! I know it’s not on display right now, Peter, but surely you have a heart? In fact, he does. The gnome collection stays, in part. Only the ones dearest to me. And they will be packed away in the tiny house in the attic.Since we’ve now begun this Great Purging as the first step in our cunning little plan, I now understand that I must strike a balance between the vision I hold for living in our current home, and the one I hold for our future life on the boat, and into our next land based home, wherever that may be. As I go through cupboards, closets, and drawers, holding these visions before me, I ask about each one: Does this help me live the life I want to live in my home now?  Does this item belong in the life I will live in the future? If the answer to both of those questions is no, out it goes. Peter would be so proud.

He's living the life he wants to live.