The Secret of Life [#22]

"The Secret of Life is this," announced Curly, raising his leather-gloved pointer finger in the air.

"Your finger?" challenged Mitch.

"No." The hardened old cowboy, was unmoved. 

"It's just one thing." 

"Well, what is it?!" pressed Mitch, eager for the answer.

But Curly wouldn't budge. "You have to figure that out for yourself."

At least that’s the version of the scene’s dialogue as transcribed to my long-term memory by my then-teenage brain.

I realize I could pull a three-minute YouTube clip and get it just right, but my now-forty-something brain just doesn’t want to. Plus, if you’ve been with us for a minute, you’re already well-accustomed to my propensity for lazy-dazy. This is just par for the course.

No doubt, the wisdom of City Slickers runs deep like bottomless margaritas.

I think a lot about the Secret of Life these days and about how fluid my own interpretation has been over the decades:

At 17, mine read like a femi-grungy ode to flannel and basketball, layered over a mixtape soundtrack of Liz Phair and Courtney Love. Because — you know — overkill is key at 17.

Five years later, John and I found each other and together we were passionate explorers and determined adventurers. Travel and spontaneity ruled our world.

But by the time another five rolled past, we were parents and teachers, and schedules and minivans defined every minute of every day. 

It would be another decade before our Secret of Life would begin to find familiar wording — before themes like adventure and travel and exploration would again be critical elements of our mantra.

And, it would still be another five beyond that before we’d be able to put our money where our Secret of Life mouth was.

Sometimes, I wonder how bizarre all this must be for Wyatt and Hudson.

I have no grand illusions that, as near-14- and 16-year-old boys, they’ve yet stopped to define their own personal mission statements.

Is boat life helping them write it? Will their travels today inspire their choices tomorrow? Will they leave Ruby Vi as the confident, competent, and worldly human beings we hope they’ll become? Will living their formative teen years anchored to their parents’ life-goals help them draft their own (or simply make them despise us)?

For better or worse, we’ve rolled those dice. Maybe in a few years we’ll be able to tell if we tossed a seven. (Or snake eyes.)

Until then, as the dice bounce haphazardly across the craps table of life, we’re nearing the beginning of yet another chapter.

For the past two weeks, our choix du jour has been deciding which direction to turn after our Bahamas run ends. East? West?

Do we battle the Thorny Path east to Puerto Rico, through the Virgin Islands, and on down through the Leewards and Windwards before finding Panama? Or, do we ride the trades west to explore Central America’s Caribbean coastline?

The boys are reluctantly adapting to this constant state of flux — to the brutal reality that once the weather allows and we start moving again, there’s no wholly accurate way to safely predict where (or when) we’ll arrive until we actually show up.

An increasingly frustrating pill to swallow, as we try desperately to create time and space for our favorite people to visit.

Curly was right that we each have to figure out the Secret of Life for ourselves. And he was right-ish about it being one thing. What he left out is that one thing is not one word (except when it is and that word is rosé); it’s not one idea or even one sacred belief.

The Secret of Life isn’t something we can figure out once and then walk away from.

It’s not even an essay we can spell-check and confidently turn in for a gold star.

If only it were so simple.

In reality, finding our Secret of Life has been more like writing an endless dissertation — one we revise and rewrite and add-to and omit-from at will.

One we can share with others or keep to ourselves. We can invite co-authors and guest writers to collaborate whenever we choose. It can expand and shrink and expand again.

However, not unlike a doodle, it does seem to require constant hand-holding.

We’re rolling into our fourth week at anchor in Georgetown, Exuma.

We’ve met, and continue to meet, new friends and families as cruisers come and go from the harbor. We discover and play and hike and mingle and happy-hour. We explore town, enjoy convenient access to groceries and diesel, meet locals.

We can also now vouch for the quality of the hospital (back-to-back doozies for Hudson: dog bite and his first-ever ear infection — go figure).

In the midst of it all, John’s sister and her family survived a squall-y week with us aboard Ruby Vi over the holidays.

Now we’re itching to move on.

As we prepare for what’s next and impatiently wait for a weather window to head south, we’re endlessly trying to reconcile the manuscript that is our current Secret of Life with where we want to go, how we plan to get there, and who we hope to see along the way — a process that, true to boat-form, is both exhilarating and exhausting. So we write and we wait and we rewrite.

The process is ongoing. We won’t get to stop and hand this gem in for a grade.

Our Secret of Life dissertation doesn’t hold the promise of that sweet sigh of relief as we hit save for the last time. And despite the lifetime of effort we’ll dedicate to revising it, we all know this particular thesis won’t earn us any doctoral degrees.

On the bright side, even riddled with run-on sentences, made up words, and comma splices, it does seem to be taking us on a pretty wild ride.

And, much to John’s delight, spelling doesn’t seem to count.