And no pictures to prove it

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Last week I signed up to “escort” a shore excursion in Antigua. This is a cool opportunity crew has to tag along with the adventures offered to sailors. It is technically a volunteer experience as we are often asked to help out a little, but helping usually consists of being the line leader to the bus and filling out a survey afterward. It’s a great way to do really fun things in port for free.

The excursion I signed up to escort was “Half Day Catamaran to Beach”. Which sounded pretty fucking perfect to me. Antigua was the only port left that I had not yet gotten off to explore and this was my last chance.

I met the Shore Excursion people at 9:30am and by 9:50 I was leading a group of about 30 sailors down to the gangway and out to the port where we met our tour guide, a delightfully grumpy Antiguan woman who mama ducked us to a small dock just in time for our catamaran to pull up. We hopped on and buzzed away from the chaos.

It is difficult to explain how incredible it feels to leave the ship and get on a boat. Please feel free to go back into the archives at shiplogblog.com for an in depth explanation on the difference between a ship and a boat. They are not the same. The ship is an artificial floating city where I both live and work. A boat is FREEDOM. It zips right past the towering hulk of the ship and zooms away into paradise.

Antigua IS paradise. It has a truly indescribable color to it’s water. Milky teal? That sounds gross. Lightly pearlescent blue green. That’s better.

I sat at the front of the catamaran by the nets with some sailors from Houston and navigated the usual questions about what it’s like working on a ship that always come when people find out I’m crew. I’m used to it. It’s boring but not terribly taxing. It honestly makes me seem exotic and interesting which of course I am.

We got to our first destination, a coral reef. I donned my snorkeling gear and nerdy bright orange floatie that I was required to wear for insurance reasons and jumped in. I love being in the water and bonus points for any opportunity I get to keep my face submerged for as long as possible. I’ve seen enough reefs to recognize that this one was dying, but most of them are. It didn’t make the parrot fish any less beautiful.

After about 15 minutes I climbed back on the boat, already sporting what would turn out to be a pretty killer sunburn on my ass, and I broke my no day drinking rule to partake in some local rum punch and flirt with the boat crew.

We unmoored from the reef and sailed to shore, pulling right up onto Dickenson Bay Beach, one of the more beautiful and popular beaches on the island. Our snorkeling guide Marke handed me another rum punch and asked if I’d like to share a joint with him, an offer I had to regretfully decline due to the invisible contractual tether tying me to maritime law no matter where I am.

I swam alone into that pearlescent water and got my heart pumping with some gentle freestyle laps back and forth away from the tourists. Here’s where that spontaneous joy comes in.

It hit me like a wave, tickling each chakra from the root to the crown until it burst out of me in a surge of laughter. I floated there in that tropical eden, looking out over the ocean, overcome with such gratitude for this existence, this life, this planet, there was nothing I could do but laugh and spin while tears spilled from my eyes and the salt from my body rejoined the mother from which it came.

I may complain sometimes about the sacrifices required to do this job, to be away from my friends and family for such long periods of time, but it’s moments like this that remind me how lucky I am. If I died tomorrow I would die happy knowing I didn’t waste my life tucked away in some cubicle I hated. I LIVED. I may never have any measurable success or money or a storybook romance for the ages, but I walked out into the world bravely and I tasted life, the good and the bad and I thanked the stars for the meal.

I got day drunk and suffered the subsequent hangover because sometimes the cute boat crew and sunshine call for breaking your own rules.

Here’s the kicker. I didn’t take one picture that day. I never even took my phone out of my bag. I’d like to think my memory will hold this one for me. I am trying to break the habit of performing life for the algorithm. This life is for me, not for the followers or the saturated calorie rich validation I get from the likes or for Suckerberg’s bank account.

My journal, this blog post and my own neurons will have to be enough to sustain this memory’s hold. And if the fog of age and time take it, that’s ok too. Because the magical connection I felt to all things in that sparkling milky teal moment charged me like a battery of love and joy and gratitude and that will never not be true.

Thanks for reading and joining me on this journey of living an authentic life in an increasingly artificial world. Breaking my old people pleasing habits and nurturing love within myself instead of chasing it from external sources has been a longer path than I could have imagined, but I’m walking it and I’m happy to know I’m not walking alone.