A Hundred Feet

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Standing off the back of a ship at night in the middle of the ocean is the strangest feeling I know.

The deck lights throw a haze that hangs out over the water, a kind of halo, and inside it you can see about a hundred feet of wake — white foam churned up and rolling out behind you. Past that the light quits. The foam goes on for a while and then it’s just gone into black, and you have no idea how far down or how far out any of it goes.

It’s dark. It’s enormous. It’s the most powerful thing I’ve ever stood in front of and I could look at it for hours.

I’ve only been on the ocean a handful of times in my life. Every time I leave it I miss it more than I did before.

I’ve started to suspect we don’t come out here for the islands at all. The islands are wonderful and I’d go back to some of them tomorrow. But there’s a real chance we book these trips just to spend a few days out in the middle of the water with land nowhere in any direction.

There’s a parallel here about my life and I’ve been resisting it, because it doesn’t hold as cleanly as I’d like.

The easy version is that I love being out in the middle of things. Which is true — I like being in the thick of the work, in the middle of the struggle, some days with no clear idea where I am, and I’ve built a life that keeps me there most of the time.

But I also like the shore. A lot. I like knowing there’s a place I can get back to.

Anybody who tells you they only want one of those is selling something.

Every post I write ends up back at my faith, and this one gets there faster than most.

I believe in a God who spoke and there was a universe. Who said something on each of those days and something new existed that had never existed before, and who is, at a level I can’t get to the bottom of, an artist.

There’s a whole industry devoted to bringing people out here comfortably. Good food, entertainment, somebody making the bed. And all of that apparatus succeeded tonight in putting me in exactly one position, which was standing at a rail in the dark with my knees going out from under me, understanding how small I am.

I’m very small. The ocean is very large. And the God who made it is larger than the ocean.

Tomorrow’s a sea day and I’m going to sit down with the review I’ve been carrying and start planning the back half of my year.

I’ll be doing it on top of about three miles of water I can’t see the bottom of.

Tonight, though, I’m just looking at the wake. A hundred feet of it lit up, rolling away, and then nothing I can see at all.

Twenty Years

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

We got into St. Thomas at seven this morning and walked off not knowing what to expect.

It’s a small island and it feels smaller — tucked away, unhurried. People wanted our business but nobody put anything in our faces about it. We rode a gondola up to a lookout and stood there a while looking at the whole thing at once, then worked our way through shops up in the hills, including one where everything sold funds craftsmen paying for their own training.

What I noticed most was how the place sounded.

A woman from somewhere in the Northeast — not Boston but in that family, and I asked, because I wanted to know. Jamaicans. A man from the Dominican Republic. Several people from Japan. Forty thousand people live on that island and I heard a good spread of the world before lunch.

I love that. I have always loved that. Hearing where somebody’s from before they tell you is one of my favorite things about being anywhere.

We bought a few things from a woman running a shop, and she had an accent I couldn’t place except that it was European.

So I asked. She said Russia.

I told her I thought her accent was beautiful.

She told me she’d been in the United States for more than twenty years. And then she said that if there were an amount of money she could pay to be rid of it, she would pay it — and she put a word in front of “accent” that I’m not going to print.

Twenty years. Still carrying it, still hating it, and apparently not for the first time that day.

I tried to tell her what I actually meant. That I love hearing how people sound, that I love hearing what they think, that it had been the best part of my morning.

And then — I want to be honest about this, because it’s the part I keep turning over — I slipped into a bit of a Russian accent myself and told her that imitation was the sincerest form of flattery.

I meant it warmly. I have replayed it several times since and I don’t know how it landed. I hope I didn’t hurt her.

If I’d had longer, and if she’d wanted to hear it, here’s what I’d have said.

That accent isn’t a report on what she is. It’s a record of where she came from, and of every decision that took her from there to a shop on a small island a long way away. She chose a new country. She built something in it. All of that is in how she talks.

It ought to remind her of the distance she covered. Not of whatever she was trying to get away from.

That’s what I think, anyway. I got a receipt and a bag and about ninety seconds, and I don’t know the first thing about her life.

We had tacos at a little place on the island and they were excellent. Good morning, good island, and I’d go back tomorrow.

But I can’t get past that conversation.

I paid her a compliment in the only currency I had, and she couldn’t take it, because for twenty years the sound of her own voice has been something people rendered a judgment on.

Day Three

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Somewhere on day three I started itching to get back after it.

Nothing was wrong. That’s the strange part. We’d eaten well and slept in and laid around and seen genuinely beautiful things, and I was lying there feeling lethargic and vaguely dissatisfied about something I couldn’t point at.

It took me a while to name it. It’s an expectation not being met — a low gnawing one, running in the background, that says a day is supposed to have something accomplished in it.

I miss the gym. I miss the feeling of making progress. Mostly I miss having my hands around what’s going on, guiding things where they’re supposed to go, knowing what today is for.

Here’s what I don’t miss, and it stopped me when I noticed it.

I have not been stressed in about five days.

Not lower stress. None. And that is such an unusual condition for me that I had to sit with it a minute to identify what I was even feeling. I’ve been running on some level of pressure for so long that its absence didn’t register as relief. It registered as something’s off.

Which tells me the itch on day three might not be about productivity at all.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that I didn’t actually stop.

I called this a full pause. I said the seven habits were coming off for the week and I meant it.

Except I’ve read my Bible every single day out here. I’ve written a blog post every day. The Bible pictures have gone out every day. Three of the seven have run the entire trip and I never once decided to do them — they just happened, the way brushing your teeth happens.

And I’ve gotten my steps every day without trying, because when you’re on one end of a ship and everything you want is on the other end, the geometry does it for you. Add an island where you don’t know where anything is and you’ll walk five miles looking for a shop.

What actually stopped was the gym and the counting. The two that need equipment and structure and a decision.

So the week has sorted my habits into two piles for me, which I did not ask it to do. Some of them are mine now. Some of them are still scaffolding.

There’s a list waiting when I get home. Lifting, the eating and water, walking, creative time. The rest of the music that needs to go up. Social platform work I’ve been putting off for months.

And this is where I catch myself, because I could write that list a lot longer and it would feel productive to do it. The truth is I don’t need a longer list. I need to know which two or three things on it actually matter, and I still haven’t done that work.

I’m saving the mid-year review for day six. There’s a sea day coming and the family will be occupied, and I’d rather take that time from the ocean than from them.

I thought this week would tell me that taking a vacation was a good idea.

It has told me that considerably more emphatically than I was expecting.

Passenger

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

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.

Two-Thirds Down The Page

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

We missed a kayak rental this morning because of something printed on a piece of paper in our room.

It was there. That’s the part I want to say first, because it would be easy to write this as a complaint and the complaint isn’t honest. The information was in our stateroom, in a packet, on a page, and it explained exactly what we needed to do. We had it the whole time.

We just didn’t read down that far.

Here’s the shape of it. The island is a tender port, which means the ship anchors and small boats run you ashore. You need a ticket to get on a tender. We did not know that.

We showed up when we thought we were supposed to show up, without a ticket, and it took over an hour to get across.

The page that would have told us started with general information about being in port that day. Then, about two-thirds of the way down, tucked into the middle of everything else, was the one operational instruction that actually mattered.

I asked somebody. The ship was in full frenzy trying to move a few thousand people onto boats, so the answer I got was quick and incomplete, and I didn’t know enough to ask the follow-up. He had to go ask somebody else. We crossed the ship twice and stood around a long time.

We got ashore around eleven and were back aboard by two-thirty. Sunburned, worn out, and we’d swum with stingrays. It was a good day.

The kayak was thirty dollars.

So I’ve been thinking about the page instead of the kayak.

Years ago I worked somewhere that brought in a consultancy for a very large ERP implementation. Enormous project, enormous money. Their focus was functional design documentation, and they wrote it — hundreds of hours of it, genuinely thorough, full of exactly the information people needed.

It didn’t read like anything a user would ever want to open. So we ended up building training to teach people what was already written down.

As far as I know, every one of those documents got filed and never opened again.

I’ve spent twenty years around that problem. Information being available is not the same as information being findable, and the gap between those two things is where most of the real failure happens. It never looks like failure, either. It looks like documentation. Somebody can always point at the page and say it’s right there.

It was right there this morning too.

Here’s the part I keep coming back to.

This is our seventh cruise. It’s our first with this line.

I didn’t skim that page because I’m new at this. I skimmed it because I’m not. I know how a port day works. I’ve been handed a version of that packet six times before and it has never once contained anything I needed. So my eyes did what eyes do with a document they’ve already decided is boilerplate — took the top third, confirmed nothing had changed, moved on.

Something had changed. Different line, different ticketing, one paragraph two-thirds down.

Six cruises of experience is exactly what made me not read it.

If I’d been at work, reading that same page professionally, I’d probably have caught it. I’d have marked it up, pulled the actions out, made a list.

I was on vacation and I already knew how this worked.

That’s not a failure of the document.