Leaning Into Uncertainty

As I write this in the library, I watch the porthole windows fill every few seconds with a rush of coiling white water. The gimballed tables behind me, which remain still regardless of the tilt of the boat, move at 45-degree angles to the benches every few seconds. After dawn watch two days ago, I came up on deck into the post-sunrise silvery seas and saw Vuk, my watch officer, standing next to the helm beaming. "This is typical for the Pacific," he said, as a three-meter wave rolled the boat at a pitch that sent me stumbling for the rail. "We're offshore for real now!"

Finally-heading south to Palmyra.

The ocean these days looks like blue hill ranges stretching to the horizon, ridges upon shifting ridges of them mottling beneath the wind. I'm still getting used to it after we spent five or so days sailing around the Hawai'ian islands. Not that I got used to that: with the clouds coiled around the volcanoes, every time I looked out my window it still felt like I'd cut out a picture from a textbook on magma hotspots and the Pacific Ocean.

Just before we set off from the shores of Hawai'i, I called my mother for the last time, waking her up at some time past midnight in Singapore.

(Sorry, Mama. Happy late Mother's Day! The interrupted sleep was my gift.) I videoed her the sunrise. As she squinted at the screen, the outline of the bedroom where I spent ten years of my life became just visible behind her and it hit me that as weird as all of this is, the rest of the world doesn't feel real, either. As the texts and updates came in the last wave of notifications while our boat pulled away from cell service, the names and people felt like (dearly beloved and deeply missed) characters in a story I heard once upon a time.

It's difficult to imagine that in another world, I'd be helping with dinner clean in Kairos or having lunch with my friends in Branner Hall or biking down Alpine Road. Or back in Singapore, hugging my dog or sitting on the balcony drinking a coffee in the morning. I miss the deep familiarity of it all and the places and people I could find my way towards blindfolded. But I am trying, as well, to lean into this place and these people where I have-literally-no ground to fall back on except what we can see and hold right in front of us. In learning it I realize how long it's been since I've been in a place where I've had to start from scratch with everything.

Audrey, our TA, told us as we got on the boat that she likes to compare sailing to launching off into outer space. JP, the assistant engineer, reminded us a few days ago that even on the International Space Station, it would only take you an hour to return to civilization. Now, more than 400 nautical miles into our voyage, it will take us days.

Going through the pin rail, where all the ropes that control the sails attach, and memorizing where each coil went and what it did, as I try to decipher what a jig does or where an outhaul leads, repeating the names over and over, hoping against hope they'd stick and knowing they probably wouldn't, I feel so out of my depth. But it's the kind of deep dizziness that comes with when, in lab, I turn to the computer and see there's four kilometres of straight ocean below us. I have to keep shaking myself into the truth of it every few hours: I'm here, in the Pacific, sailing south on a tall ship with nothing but the wind. This is going to be my life for the next month.

I need to get used to the fact that there isn't really any finding your ground here. There's only leaning into the uncertainty of it. Anyone who knows me knows I hate uncertainty, but that's all there is: you don't know how large the next wave is going to be, you don't know what's going to set you stumbling, you don't know what's going to be on the horizon. You don't know what the meter net will pull up, you don't know what's going to be in the Niskin bottles when you twist them open and the cold water comes rushing out, from 400 meters down.

So instead I memorize the pin rails and I know where to go when someone tells me I need to haul on the halyard. Instead I learn to tense my knees and broaden my stance so a big swell won't knock me off. Instead I scan the horizon, I hope for a whale spout and in its place I get the black line of a shearwater tracing the tip of a wave. Instead we filter water and pipette DNA and make backup plans on backup plans and let them go and claim them again, one by one by one. And I find one kind of knowing always leaves room for another. Every question only points to a second just ahead. I stay for the sunset. I try to remember how it looks. I try to remember there'll never be another like it.

In The Overstory, the book I'm reading right now, there's a quote I wrote down in my notebook: "The only true things are humility and looking." These days that's all there is: I'm at the bow, I'm looking out. With every horizon I scan I'm reminded the whole world comes before my body. I am still growing into the shape of it.