Disclaimer: A personal blog entry with more self-help than boaty business. (took me a couple extra weeks to wrap my head around writing this).
In October of 2020 immediately following my first bout with the virus I decided to quit alcohol. 223 days later as the boat hit the water I promptly tossed that ideology aside in favor of a typical summer full of libations and the usual boat-life shenanigans. In that experiment the road to restraint was paved with distraction and simple avoidance, but no real change.
I see a Thai massage friend when I can (Thai Massage in Vermont). We got to talking one day, and the conversation ran from social media to sobriety to meditation and the internal noise that links those topics. She simply said “oh yes I call it the Pre-Frontal Storm” I immediately fell in love with the use of the term as the best way to summarize the dizzying cacophony of digital and mental distractive noise in my day to day. In considering the challenges of removing alcohol from my life I realized that the failure point in 2020 was largely due to the ‘prefrontal storm’ associated with approaching something from a stance of avoidance and distraction.
Want to confront your own prefrontal storm? Start with meditation. This is it’s own very long blog post so I won’t go into it here, but I highly recommend Dan Harris’ book 10% Happier. The tag line is “How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works: A True Story. Its an easy read and it may well change your life.
Changing behavior in today’s world is exponentially more difficult than it ever has been. With ‘social’ media, AI, streaming entertainment and all manner of news media at our fingertips, the availability of distraction and avoidance activities permeates and infiltrates every corner of our existence.
I have long wrestled with my relationship with alcohol (spoiler alert: I recently quit). In researching sober practices I came across the concept of High-Bottom vs High Functioning drinkers. Those that have not had what most would consider a rock bottom event… YET (Here’s a great podcast on the topic). Not that I am one for labels but this is where I placed myself, with grand emphasis on the ‘yet’ part.
FOMO
I am a sailor. I am a drinker. They go hand in hand in my world. So the concept of quitting alcohol was met with some serious FOMO - Fear of Missing Out. Missing parties on the dock, missing the uninhibited conversations, missing being the life of the party, missing the ease of socializing, and and and…. Since 2020 my perspective on FOMO has shifted. I no longer focus on what I might miss while drinking… I focus on what I will certainly miss if I didn’t stop drinking… Tame the FOMO I say… in today’s dopamine driven society - this may well be the first true step towards real change.
Lets get physical
If you have been following this blog in it’s limited existence you’d know that we converted a boat from diesel to electric over this past winter. Shortly before delivery of the new motor and installation I began to ask questions about the physics of the new motor - propeller size, torque specs, RPM’s etc. Answers were slow to roll in if they came at all. This gave me some pause but I was too far down the rabbit hole after a major modification to the boat to alter course at that point… at least so I thought. If I had to draw an ‘on-topic-correlation’ - the road to progress here was paved with distraction and avoidance. This time in the form of my obsession with the engineering and art of the installation leaving me largely avoiding the physics.
A Do Over
As it turns out the fancy electric motor we installed in Blue has turned out to be 100% the wrong device and rendered the boat rather unsafe in anything but dead calm conditions. Next week’s post will have all the details, but Blue is currently out of the water with the motor removed and crated being shipped back to the manufacturer for refund (we are fortunate for their support). Let’s just call it a do-over.
In a similar vane (as best put by a sober friend of mine), I spent the last 20 or so years drinking generally too much, let’s spend the next 20 (love me some lofty goals) doing all the things I likely missed while on that path… Let’s just call it a do-over.
