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Account form an addict/ alcoholic.
I never knew a time when I didn’t want to be somebody else, when I felt I didn’t belong, and a distorted sense of self, and certainly always felt there was something wrong with me. I felt then a deep sense of shame of being me.
I was a functioning, until the last years, addict/alcoholic and lost my health, family, marriage, home and business. I have drunk as long as I was able, finishing the left over’s at parents parties as young as 10. At 17 I wanted the life ‘drugs, sex, and rock and roll ‘(1967) and I found it. 25 years of heroin addiction followed and large quantities of alcohol and any other drug I could get my hands on it.
This took me down a path of anti-social behaviour and criminal activity to pay for my addiction and for the adrenaline rush. I stole from my family, children, business and friends. By the end I was physically, emotionally and spiritually crippled and incapable of functioning.
Finally I realized I might die, I had had many near death experiences and thanks to the health service returned to the living, but until the end I believed I would get away with it. I then made a decision to live. I wanted life.
Today I am fully functioning, aware, responsible and honest individual. I know love and am able to love. I feel fulfilled and gratitude for the life I have. I have moments of peace and happiness.
My recovery would not be what it is today if I hadn’t had the experiences of sailing and that connection with the elements. I learnt through sailing to trust my body it does not lie to me, asses’ problems and feel the self-esteem in solving them. The most difficult place for me had been to accept the present for exactly what it is and listen and trust it,( it always seemed safer to be in the past or future) this is a prerequisite for successful sailing in order to achieve goals, to do this I need to know where I am where I am going and how I am going to get there. If the conditions, or my condition changes I need to make changes and if necessary let go of the goal and move in sympathy with the world around me.
Being at sea has opened a door for me, this sense of a connection to the world around me, to myself and has become the basis for a more spiritual way of living.
I think the following quote by Arturo Perez-Reverte expresses some of my thinking around the experience of being at sea.
“The land lies behind him, and everything he could need was travelling with him, circumscribed by the tight limits of the ship. At sea he thought, men travelled with their houses on their backs, like the knapsack of the explorer or the shell that moves with the snail. All you need is a few gallons of diesel, sails, and a favourable wind, for everything that dry land provided, to become superfluous, dispensable. Voices, noises, smells, the tyranny of the clock had no meaning here. To sail out until the coast falls behind your stern – that was one goal met. Facing the menacing and magical presence of the omnipresent sea, sorrow, desire, sentimental attachments, hatreds and hopes dissolve in the wake, dwindling until they seem far away, meaningless, because the ocean brings people back to themselves. There are things which are unbearable on shore – thoughts, absences, anguishes – can only be borne on the deck of the ship. There is no painkiller as strong as that. Men survive on ships who would have lost their reason and tranquillity forever anywhere else. Course, wind, waves, position, and the days run, survival; out there these are the only words that have meaning. Because it is true that the real freedom, the only possible freedom, the true peace of God, begins five mile from the nearest coast.” |
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