An unfathomable vastness

You are surrounded by crescents and valleys, blue mountain ranges and soft rolling hills. Above you the sky tarries on, boundless as imagination, speckled and adorned by clouds. This is your world, and you are at home in it. At home within the wood and steel, rock and tree that harbour you within them, in harmonious concert with the wind and current, pulling you from place to place in an endless dance.

This is your home and its inhabitants are family. Not always in accordance with the exact meaning of the term, but in the way that pots and pans in the same drawer must all share in the space and are united in their overarching purpose. This voyage, this home, has proven a most hospitable and agreeable drawer to share, the contents of which I wish to examine and discuss.

Coming onto this ship, I had few expectations but harboured, tightly to myself, big hopes and perhaps even aspirations. A vital determining factor in how well the aforementioned hopes and aspirations were going to be achieved came down to the human element, the variable beyond control, the unison and harmony of a group of strangers, vagabonds, adventurers, travelers and sailors from scattered corners of the globe, coming together and making this ship work. Equally, it depended on the human element of a crew which would need to guide, instruct, supervise and occasionally reprimand us, in such a way as to ensure that the ship not only worked, but also got us to where we needed to go.

Merely a day into this voyage, and my worries had been laid soundly to rest. I have seen stranger transformed to friend, buddy and bunkmate, have seen the veil of borders blur and fall away in favour of community and ship, with naught but a shared understanding of world and home, as it presented itself to us in the form of hull and wave. It is not a lonely world out there. The sea may be incomprehensibly vast, deeper than the greatest depths, but still it offers home and hearth to those that are willing to share in it. To haul away as one, share meal and bunk, duty and pleasures, liquors and conversation. Such things should not be kept in isolation. It goes against our very nature.

Suffice to say, if the worst we must endure is Tim’s immature innuendos, Henk’s peculiar sleeping habits, communal sleep deprivation and Mike’s 45-minute morning process, I would wager to say that it could’ve been a lot worse.

Because in spite of varying backgrounds, beliefs, histories, stories, values and humours, humans are, if anything, adaptable creatures, and like pots and pans, they will find ways to fit, sometimes more elegantly, sometimes less, into the same proverbial drawer. It has been a most revitalising experience, particularly in light of the world at large and all that transpires in it, to see that shared laughter, song and immature innuendos are all that is needed for a group of vagabonds and travelling strangers to become a harmonious group of oddballs, friends, and, with respect (and a generous amount of disregard) to the actual definition of the word, family. Family for this moment in time, after which it will irreversibly shift, rise and fall and be swept away to places new and old, just like the waves upon which it was built; just like the ever-changing sea, whose boundless change makes up the very world we’re on, in steel and wood, and by whose grace we make for distant shores.