Countdown to casting off – How does it feel?

Brookline is awash in the colors of spring.  Purple and pink and highlighter green.  There’s a yellow magnolia on Toxteth Street where, several times now, I’ve seen a cardinal perched in the branches.  It’s almost as if he knows that this tree will cause his red to pop more than any other tree.  It’s my favorite palette.  I’m paying close attention because it will be my last spring here for awhile, if not forever.

Who quits their corporate job at 53, two years shy of full vesting, and decides to sell (most) everything and go sailing?  Me, that’s who.  And Chris too, minus the corporate job part.  He sold his business to a trusted employee, and everything about that statement makes me proud of him.  Sometime mid-pandemic we made the decision to leave everything behind and try a new way of living for a bit.  It’s something we had been talking about for a long while and after two years of isolation, and more than a little sadness at the state of things, we couldn’t find any good answer to the question “Why haven’t we gone yet?”

Writing this blog post has been on my to-do list since January, which is when the Captain put together our Countdown to Casting off task list.  For some reason, it’s been easier to sell a car, hire movers, find an apartment for the soon-to-be college graduate in the family, write a will, give away half our stuff, find a storage unit for the rest of our things, sell the house (June 1st closing!), have a colonoscopy, get my teeth cleaned and generally take care of the 80+ other items on that list, than it has been to write this post.

Chris is the writer in the family, so that probably has something to do with it.  Also, the prompt I was given (see top of page) asks me to answer the question about how it feels to be getting ready to do this, which means 1) talking about feelings, and those who know me, know I have LOTS of feelings and 2) trying to say something interesting, which feels daunting.  Then I remembered that probably only my sister and Joel Goldberg will read this (Hi Jules!  Hi Joel!).  The stakes, it turns out, are pretty manageable and so here I am getting it done.

How does it feel?  It feels right.  It feels absolutely right.  Which is surprising when you consider that sailing across oceans and living on a 36 foot sailboat wasn’t ever on my bucket list.   It’s not to say that I don’t have moments, not of doubt, but of keen awareness of the fact that there are consequences to this decision that are hard.  Saying goodbye to family and friends for a time – that’s the most difficult thing – but even in the hard moments I feel certain that we’ve made the right choice.  We may fail spectacularly, who knows, but what I do know for certain is that giving it a try is the only choice to have made.

See you on the water.

– Alex