We shared stories and experiences. I told them of my very material job and other things. The moment of inspiration or clarity. The second monk said.
“Through meditation Dan, one day you may stand in a supermarket and be surrounded by the calmness that is the ocean.”
Magic.
I may not have known it at a time but I did. My solution for my breakdown was a week in Berlin which shall henceforth be known as the Zebra Toned Berlin Bandaid experiment. Whilst this experiment did patch me up enough to get here it was always a bandaid and the bandaid is now hanging in my wardrobe. I am not sure I will wear that armour again.
My return home as afforded me a lot of time by myself and an absence of distraction. I have became disenamoured with my usual distractions and have become attracted inward. Introspection is a strange beast it feeds itself like a black hole and seeks more introspection. On Tuesday I decided I would seek formal training in meditation. Romantically & stupidly I always thought I would always have to climb a mountain and go off the grid to do this. It turns out you don’t have to go very far at all. I have found a local monastery and will attend a Sunday session tomorrow.
Some of my readers may be tut tutting at this thought but I will now present you with a counter.
“Have you ever met an annoying Buddhist?”
I am most certainly not going down this path merely plucking a facet I wish to incorporate into my way of life. There is a perfectly scientific reasoning for this.
Cortisol is the stress hormone.
Meditation lowers cortisol very effectively.
Anyway this is all deep and heady stuff let us get back to the punchline, the bewilderment if you will.
I asked the monastery what I needed to take with me. Very fittingly and wisely they asked me to bring some food for the monk. This might seem easy for someone who has a thorough knowledge of food or the desires of the enlightened. The people in my life who have seemed temporarily enlightened in some capacity have always had a complete and wanton disregard for food. Me myself? Well I could quite happily eat the same three meals for the rest of my life.
Right I thought I will ask this weird consciousness that we are all attached to and this is where it gets really bizarre. Google provides a dearth of useless pages detailing the heady dietary concerns of various Buddhists. Some of them are vegetarians. Some of them are root vegetable challenged. Some of them eat some meats at some times of the year. Some spices are ok. Some fruits may or may not be in favour given the current calendar day. The thunderbolt had landed.
This all gets all the more frustrating when you try to acquire food walking this tightrope of choice. Surely I should be growing this food myself, blessing it in my own way and nurturing it into being. I then thought I would go to a supermarket. Oh the humanity. After a week of navel gazing a supermarket provides a jarringly sharp insight into what Monks are not.
Anyway the real point on this blog post is to provide an easily acquired shopping list for someone who wants to provide a Monk some food in exchange for some Meditation training. After seemingly hours of wandering this is the best I could come up with.
I hope this will be ok. I do have a loophole. Google says they accept money as Koha as well.
It has been a couple of years since I have worked on a conventional sized yacht. It has been a couple of years since I have worked during a conventional carter. I have always felt there is a sweet spot for yachting. Boats between 65-80 meters have enough crew that you can have a different conversation each day. You still get to dock in marinas as opposed to commercial docks. You also get to be in port a lot more often. So what has really struck me upon downsizing?
I did have a notably expensive hair cut in Port Cervo. It was 100 euro all up including some hair product. I have not paid for a hair cut since an ill fated one in Viareggio where my nose was invaded and eyebrows mortally aggrieved. That was 4 years a go so I took the heinous price on the chin.
Today marks three weeks exactly three weeks until I begin my long commute home. It’s been a while. I am very much looking forward to it.
Finally? enjoy some photos. No post processing just looking outside a bit more.
A slight digression. My most unpopular phrase at the moment.
“it is what it is”
Usually uttered by someone with less life experience than a premature mushroom spore.
It may be it but it is still shit and I do not accept it.
Troublesome owners would be my biggest concern here and I have experienced a few.
I am a deeply sensitive person and I refuse to accept the poor treatment of anyone. People turning a blind eye to abuse because it doesn’t affect them directly makes me very ANGRY.
“A rich pig is still a pig” and you can quote ME on that.
Anyway. I have been rescued from my predicament by my fairy god mother recruitment agent.
I have a new boat to join. I am downsizing but I think it is time. It is a boat coming home as well which for many yachties is a dream.
Time to live it again.
Well that has to be one of the most intense weeks of my life.
I can’t remember a time when my brain ached more from crackling synapses. I arrived in France last Sunday in a pretty good state. My flight(s) went smoothly and my only angst was felt in the cavernous Dubai airport which for reasons unbeknownst has a million curiously busy toilets and a swathe of people seemingly living inside the airport.
I landed in Nice and was greeted with a grand sight. A driver carrying a name board with the clan name McConnell. Let it be known that I still am humble and to see my first driver carrying a name board made me very happy indeed.
Soon enough I was on board my newest Mega Yacht. The ship was running a drill soon after I arrived so I dodged this drill by hanging in my temporary cabin. I was at pains to explain that utilizing me in a drill after 40 hours of travelling would be very dangerous. The drill soon took out all of the lighting in my cabin. This was by design but luckily enough like all good ETO’s I had packed a head torch.
I met my rotation partner who was very friendly, very knowledgeable and very German. I soon learned that we had no Radio system and we would attempt a repair the next morning.
“Everything was going fine until we tried to fix something”
Power cycling is sometimes bad. When we power cycled the rack which supplies the brains to the radio system one of our core switches did not turn back on. The other switch lost its marbles. Neither switch had been turned off for 4 years. I won’t share more technical details but needless to say the rest of the week was spent fixing problems and trying to get a full and comphrehensive understanding over the numerous and very complicated systems.
I thought I had an endless appetite for technology but after a week of ramming my brain with passwords/address’s/names/procedures I am deeply tired. I have started to question why we need so many blackberries? Why do stewardess’s need iPads to read napkin folding books? Why do Chefs need iPads to read recipes? It goes on and on and on.
Compounding this week has been the very real and present threat of Guests who have been using the boat. Stealth has been needed for and being quiet.
I did take time to draw some diagrams which have served me well.
Today my rotation partner left. I am all alone but I do now have a batcave to call my own. We should have a few days to catch our breaths before it all begins again. I am hoping to see a Nancyless Sam who flew away today. Do you remember Sam? The quintessential English man?
Did I tell you I am tired already? zzzzz.
I still don’t have a reason but after countless hours of musing.
“I was not posh enough”
Needless to say my brain toiled on the 30 hour flight home coming up with wise and pointed things to unleash from my fingers at the vessel. I would sink it with vicious verse. To this very morning I was still going to write this angry email but I lost motivation when I got offered another much more suitable position.
Yacht recruitment is a strange and curious beast. A lot of the good jobs are never advertised. The crew agents spam Captains and HOD’s with hundreds of CV’s and it is very hard to get that face to face interview. After a couple of weeks of badgering crew agents I did have a bit of a brainwave…..
I have not been doing much writing and I would write my way out of this predicament. My words have always served me well but over the last year I have abandoned them. So I wrote a covering letter/story which tells my tale. I solicited some good luck from proven candidates. I then had the good fortune to find out about a position that was not advertised. 5 days later I have a job offer and will be flying to Europe next week.
There is a nice symmetry with this. It is five years ago just after easter Anna and I began our tentative steps as Sailors.
Disclaimer
