ice cream cone life

What is most challenging about living at sea is not the sleepless nights of stomach upheaval or the lack of space or even the salt spray that eventually consumes everything, no, what is most challenging is the constant unknown.  The unknown of what tomorrow will bring, whether that is rough seas or calm.  Previously undiscovered islands or yet another day of waiting, searching, finding nothing, and hearing from no one.  No one besides the few people that you also share your self-enduced confinement with.  And you might say that how can you feel confined when hundreds of miles of empty ocean surround you on every side?  But empty it is.  Or at least appears so from our terrestrial-centric view.  Us land-dwellers, we aren't built for oceanic travel.  The mediocre swimming that we are capable of leaves us entirely vulnerable to anything that could be in the depths below.  Our forward looking eyes, so great for searching forests for fruits and books for words, are helpless in the water.  Attached firmly to the front of our skulls, they are forever pointing down in the water, lending us oblivious to lateral attacks. Our legs, which are so great for running across prairies, chasing deer, are laughably inefficient kicking through liquid.  Its not a coincidence that the life aquatic is full of fins.  And our minds, prepared for complex analytical thinking, grow nervous when left alone with nothing to do but roll from one swell to the next.  With nothing but shiny blue all around, the mind invents puzzles for itself.  Something to solve, a code to crack, a story to invent, a hope to get lost in.  Though, in reality, there was never anything there to start with.

Maybe this is why the sea is also so enticing.  The still, unknown is an adventure from our stimulated lives.  We seek to step out into a world that is more foreign even than that of the moon.