1000 days- Crossing the Threshold

The only failure is not to try.

I am a landlocked artist living in a small village. My quest is to own a yacht, and go blue-water sailing, exploring the tropical islands of the world. In 1000 days I must find a way to own the yacht. This is my story, starting from where I am right now, facing the greatest challenge I’ve ever dared to dream of making a reality…

Today is the day. A one thousand day countdown starts now. There is no turning back. Why a thousand days, and what am I planning to do? To answer that question I must first go back to what happened 659 days ago…

I was living in a one bedroom dwelling. No kitchen. Only space for a bed and a small desk, a couple of bookshelves and adjoining bathroom. But the view outside – priceless. No houses, no clutter of sharp angled civilization. Only a mountain that changed its mood with the weather. But even with the beauty outside my door I felt trapped. A slow and relentless nagging. Something was wrong. My father was withering away from cancer, and I felt for the first time the noose of mortality tightening around my own life.

Something had to change. I saw myself trapped in the same room, passing through life like flipping through channels, like doom scrolling, unless I did something about it. With a flash of inspiration I realized ‘change to change’. Do something – start small. Anything. Just commit to one small change. That’s when I made the commitment – write three pages of stream-of-consciousness thoughts every morning before getting out of bed. Every morning. Fountain pen and paper, write in an unlined journal that I had made. By candlelight. That’s it. Just that. Little did I know what would slowly be revealed by scraping the bottom of the barrel of my mind.

Exactly forty days after my father departed for his well deserved rest – day 154 of this daily writing – the Morning Pages became the Quest Pages. The undercurrents of deeper thoughts were becoming visible, and the patterns were beginning to show. Childhood dreams, forgotten adventures, and yearnings that were buried under the hustle of ordinary life began to surface again. Ordinary – getting trapped in our own comfortable routines.

Then I started doing some calculations. You know – working out how many days till I hit the next decade of my life. And somewhere in all of that the idea took shape: I needed to become uncomfortable. I needed a challenge. A seemingly impossible challenge. One that would be like a miracle if I were to accomplish it. And then I heard the soft encouraging voice of my mother echoing in my thoughts: ‘My son, you can accomplish anything that you set your mind to do’. It lingered like the resonant chiming afterglow of a church bell. I didn’t know what to do with it, much like being told to catch a red-hot coal.

En Bleu came smuggled in through the loosely woven fabric of memory. I remembered telling a good friend ten years before that I wanted to have my own ‘Ship called Dignity’ – a blue-water sailing boat I’d call En Bleu. My own little Dignity. I had the name, and just like some stories do – pressing towards the light – the title arrives before the story does.

There are powerful vows we make, and then, as we wander through the wilderness of life in search of something, some meaning, we forget the promises we made. Promises to ourselves. A contract with our own heart. As a ten-year-old child, frustrated by the small world I was limited to, the bounds set by caring parents, I vowed to some day venture into the world and taste the wild freedom of exotic landscapes and endless horizons. I did fulfill that promise. Partially. Forty countries later. But, there’s always more: Do we follow the clues, the little sparks of mystery, that catch our attention along the way? Some of these experiences linger in memory, like a character waiting in the shadowed backstage, hoping to be called upon to play, or an apparition appearing for the first time in the writing of a novel, waiting for scribe to glance their way, to animate their life with a little inquisitive attention. That describes what was held enisled in the idea of En Bleu.

And that is where I’ll leave it for today. I’ll tell you what happened – how the wind called me, an open water adventure in a small pirogue sailing up the west coast of Madagascar, that became the catalyst patiently waiting, inviting me on this En Bleu quest.

Tell me, do you have some unfilled promise you made to yourself? Do you find yourself saying ‘there must be more to life than just this’? Is it now time to go on your own quest, to find the dream buried deep inside, waiting for you to bring it to life? Let me know.

Till we meet again, ’embrace the wind’.

Kenneth