I love watching people, and a ship is about the best place I’ve found to do it.
Everybody converges. Nationalities I couldn’t place, accents I can’t identify, families three generations deep at one table. Old people moving slow and full of life. Kids running where they shouldn’t. Somebody loud at the bar who wants the whole deck in on the joke, and somebody else at the rail by himself who clearly does not.
And once you sit with it a while the differences stop being the interesting part, because everybody out here wants the same four or five things. Their people around them. Something good to eat. A game to play. A stretch of time where nothing is difficult.
That’s it. That’s the whole list, and it’s the same list in every language on this boat.
What I can’t stop doing is wondering about the faces.
Is this just a vacation, or is somebody escaping something? Is that man dreading the flight home, or is he going back to a life he genuinely likes? Did this cost them nothing or did it cost them a year of saving?
I’ll never know any of it. I’ll pass four thousand people this week and I won’t learn one story.
Which turned the question back on me, sitting there.
What am I in all of this? A man who loves his family. A man who’s been given considerably more than he’s earned and knows it.
And a man who is finally, actually relaxing — for the first time in a long time. I’ve been on the clock for months. Longer than months. There’s been a thing to achieve every single day for most of this year and a good part of the years before it.
Out here I’ve found rest just looking at the water. The size of it. A thing I did not make and cannot influence in any direction, doing what it’s done for a very long time without any input from me.
The other piece of it is that I’m a passenger.
I’m not driving this. I don’t know the route. Somebody far more qualified than me is getting us from one place to the next, and other people are cooking, and other people are running the whole apparatus, and my job is to be aboard.
I’m not built for that. I have spent this entire year building systems so that I’m the one holding the thing together. And here I am with no responsibility for any of it, breathing all the way down for the first time in a while.
It turns out I can do it. That’s useful information about myself that I did not have last week.
I was saying most of this out loud into my phone when caught my attention, smiled, and told me good morning.
So I’m not really watching them. I’m one of the faces.
Four thousand stories under one roof, and I don’t know a single one of them. But the God who made me and loves me did exactly the same for every person on this ship.
That’ll do for a Monday.
David Willis 