350 miles left, people! We’ll arrive at the Marquesas Saturday!

Last night the moon was so bright and the clouds around the boat so laden with moisture that I saw a night rainbow! I was well and truly speechless and I’ll never forget it.

If you’re still with us in this stage of our journey, we sincerely appreciate your support and dedication. In truth, there’s not much out here in the middle of the ocean. Revelatory, I know. So often what we have to share on the blog requires a little bit of digging on our part, a frantic excavation of the day for something of import. Night rainbows notwithstanding, usually it’s just personal musings, of which there are many. So if you’ll tolerate a few more, this trip and the exercise of blogging about it has taught me the value of a few things that I hope to bring forward with me after the end of our journey. Maybe they’ll give you something to think about too.

A quiet moment to reflect:
For a lot of reasons, I don’t miss my old working life. The specific reason I’m talking about here though is the difficulty, near impossibility, I experienced with finding a moment to myself to think. About myself, about my relationships, about my goals, about my heart. And it turns out, I quite enjoy the exercise of reflection. It helps me heal, it helps me understand other people better, and it helps me stretch my capacity for change. I know its a luxury, and I’m nearly certain I’ll have to go back to a working life, but I hope going forward I carve out more space for me to be alone with myself, just to think.

Gratitude:
Well before the start of this trip, I have tried to be someone who is actively grateful for the things around me. Being stuck on a boat for three weeks has taken that to a new level, a simpler one. Most days, Gavin, Colin, and I play “Best part/Worst part” and share brief descriptions of those parts of our days. More often than not, the “best part” is dedicated to the small things that would typically be beneath our notice. Clean water and a freshly washed face. The way birds fly mere inches over the water, wending between the swells. Stars. I don’t propose anyone go around trying to be grateful all of the time; that’s exhausting and insincere. But I think it’s important to remember that really small moments can bring a lot of peace, and being able to name them gives you easier access to that peace.

Patience:
Moving over 2500+ miles at what could generously be called a jogging pace, it’s easy to imagine other times in history and places in the world where transport was/is less advanced. Covered wagons and horseback riding and walking to town and the like. Colin and I discussed this yesterday and imagined what remarkable patience people must have in those lifestyles. They aren’t idle; their days are full from sun up to sun down, but it takes longer to accomplish tasks. Practicing patience may be one of the hardest things to do, but I can start to see very clearly that doing something slowly and well and for yourself is much more nourishing than the world of instant gratification, validation, and hyperactive productivity that we came from.