Becoming Popeye
Somewhere along the way, I became Popeye.
This was not in the plan. In fairness, I'm not entirely sure there ever was a plan. There was a rendering, maybe. A lovely one, done in colored pencil, with happy people strolling through it and no drainage problems whatsoever.
When we are young, most of us believe we know what we want. We set out into adulthood with a rough sketch of the person we intend to become. We pick careers, fall in love, marry, raise children, buy houses, sign mortgages, and generally carry on as though a finished version of ourselves is waiting somewhere up ahead, tapping its foot and wondering what is taking us so long.
I spent a good portion of my younger life trying to be something. I just never quite pinned down what.
Now, closing in on 61, I find I care a good deal less about becoming something. I am a landscape architect, a husband, a father and a Coast Guard veteran. I am a designer, occasionally a writer, increasingly a teacher and mentor, and lately a law student, which suggests that good judgment and I are still only casually acquainted. I have succeeded at some things and failed at others with real enthusiasm. I have made fine decisions and a few that looked brilliant for about fifteen minutes.
Jimmy Buffett once sang about a life holding equal shares of magic and tragedy that still turned out to be a good one all the way through. I can't improve on the sentiment, so I won't try.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, I arrived at a surprisingly comfortable conclusion, best expressed by that great sailor and underrated philosopher, a man whose entire health plan consisted of canned spinach:
"I yam what I yam."
Taking a Fix
Here is the funny part. I don't see that realization as a destination. It is a position.
Anyone who has navigated knows you cannot decide where you are going until you know where you are. You take a fix. On the water, that is obvious. In life, apparently, it is a skill most of us acquire somewhere around the time reading glasses start multiplying in the kitchen drawers.
We spend a remarkable amount of energy navigating from where we believe we should be. By now I should have accomplished this. My career should look like that. I should have more money, fewer problems, and all of this figured out. That is like plotting a course from the spot on the chart where you expected the boat to be rather than where it actually is. You can draw a fine course that way, neat and confident and perfectly straight. And it will carry you directly onto an unseen reef.
Perhaps one of the privileges of age is a growing willingness to take an honest fix. This is where I am, what I have, and what I have learned. These are my strengths and these, regrettably, are my shortcomings. These are the people I love and the things that matter.
I yam what I yam.
Position established. Now what?
Existing Conditions
My profession has a version of this. Every design begins with existing conditions, and a good designer learns what a place already is before deciding what it should become. The ones who arrive with a pretty picture and try to force the land to match it usually learn their lesson during the first heavy rain.
People may not be so different. When we are young, we carry a rendering of the successful life around in our heads and spend years trying to make the site conform. Eventually life hands us the survey, complete with constraints we didn't choose, views we never anticipated, some storm damage, and now and then something wonderful growing in a spot where we never meant to plant anything at all.
Working intelligently with the site you were actually given isn't resignation. It's just good design.
Plotting the Course
Knowing where you are still leaves the other question: where do you want to go from here?
That is where navigation begins. You establish your position, study the chart, weigh the conditions, choose a destination and plot a course. But plotting a course does not relieve you of the duty to navigate, and that distinction matters more to me every year.
A course is an intention.
Navigation is a practice.
The wind shifts. Current sets you sideways. Weather builds. Equipment fails, generally at night and always at the least convenient moment. New information arrives, and sometimes the destination itself looks different as you draw closer.
A good navigator pays attention and keeps asking the same questions. Where am I now? Where am I headed? Is this course getting me there? And the one we tend to skip:
Is that still where I want to go?
Sometimes the answer is no. That doesn't mean you failed. It may simply mean you know more now than you did when you left the harbor. So you take another fix and plot another course.
Dead Reckoning
Old navigators relied on dead reckoning. You calculate where you ought to be from your starting point, your heading, your speed and the time elapsed. The result is an estimated position, which is a polite way of saying an educated guess made with a pencil.
Life involves a great deal of dead reckoning. At 25 we figure where we'll be at 40, and at 40 we figure where we'll be at 60. Then we look up and discover the shoreline is not where the math said it would be.
The temptation is to assume something has gone wrong, and maybe it has. Or maybe the current ran stronger than expected, or the wind backed around, or we altered course years ago and barely noticed. Maybe we put into a port we never meant to visit and found we rather liked the place.
What matters is not where the old calculation says you should be. What matters is where you actually are. Navigate from there.
Drift
Not every change announces itself. Habits, relationships, responsibilities, comfort, disappointment, success, fear and opportunity can all arrive quietly. Like a current, they nudge us a little each day until we find ourselves miles from the course we thought we were holding. Nobody ever sets out to drift. That is the whole problem with drift.
So navigation calls for vigilance. Not anxiety or obsession, just awareness. Look up now and then, check the compass, take another fix, and ask whether you are still bound for somewhere you actually want to go.
Weather
Then there is weather, which you do not control. Spend enough time around boats and you learn how absurd it is to believe otherwise. In all my years on the water, the ocean has never once consulted my schedule.
You must respect weather. Sometimes you sail through it, sometimes you alter course, and sometimes you shorten sail. And sometimes the smartest thing a sailor can possibly do is find a protected harbor, drop the hook and wait it out.
That isn't quitting.
Holding position is navigation too.
There have been stretches of my life when progress looked very little like progress. There were mistakes and falls, setbacks, hurt and genuine pain. But I don't recall treating them as defeats. They were conditions. Something had changed, so I took another fix, and sooner or later another summit, another harbor, another possibility came into view.
I kept going. Partly out of conviction, and partly because the alternative was just sitting there.
A Small Green Navigator
Of course, a person can also spend far too long studying charts. You can analyze the wind, calculate set and drift, debate destinations, inspect every fitting on the boat and ponder the deeper meaning of navigation until the barnacles have organized a homeowners association on the hull.
Which brings us to another unlikely philosopher. Yoda.
"Do. Or do not. There is no try."
It is easy to hear that line as a bit of movie mysticism from a small green fellow who talks backward. It deserves more respect than that. Consider the scene. A young man, frustrated and doubting, says he will try to raise his ship from the swamp. He makes a halfhearted effort, fails, and declares the thing impossible. Then the old master, nine hundred years of patience in a body the size of a garden gnome, lifts it out himself. The young man says he doesn't believe it. Yoda's answer is four words long: that is why you fail.
What Yoda understands is that "try" is often a hedge. It is a word with an escape hatch built in. When I say I will try, I have already given myself permission to fail, and very often I have already started drafting the explanation. Trying lets us keep one foot on the dock.
Doing is different. Doing does not guarantee success. Plenty of things I have fully committed to have not worked out. But when you commit, you bring everything aboard and cast off. You stop negotiating with yourself. Whether you reach the destination or not, you actually made the passage, and you learned what the water had to teach.
Getting underway works exactly that way. You cannot try to leave the dock. Either the lines are let go or they are not. A boat still tied to the pier is not underway, it is tethered.
There is one more thing worth noticing about Yoda. He is small, old, and lives in a swamp, and he is the wisest being in the galaxy. Wisdom rarely shows up looking the way we expect. Sometimes it looks like a cartoon sailor with a pipe and a can of spinach. Sometimes it is short and green and speaks in the wrong order. And sometimes it wears flip flops and a faded Hawaiian shirt.
So Yoda has earned his place here. With a respectful bow, I will let him return to his swamp, though I suspect he'll be keeping an eye on the rest of this essay.
At some point, you have to cast off.
Contentment Is Not Complacency
This may be the distinction I understand better now than I did when I was younger.
I am content. I like where I am, and I worked hard to get here. I believe I am good at what I do. I believe I have been a good husband and father and, on balance, a good man. I have people I love and work that still holds my interest. I don't feel much need to prove that I am something more.
But contentment is not complacency.
Contentment says: I am at peace with who I am and where I am.
Complacency says: There is nowhere else worth going.
I don't believe that for a second. If anything, being comfortable in my own skin has made the horizon more interesting, not less. I no longer need the next destination to prove anything. I'm simply curious about what's out there.
A Pirate Looks at Sixty
Which brings me back to flip flops and a faded Hawaiian shirt, Jimmy Buffett, who deserves more than a passing mention.
It is easy to write Buffett off as the patron saint of margaritas and lost shakers of salt. Plenty of people do. But anyone who listened past the party songs found a man doing some serious thinking in a very unserious shirt.
Consider "A Pirate Looks at Forty." Buffett wrote it as a young man imagining himself out of step with his own time, a fellow born a few centuries too late, watching the world move on while he wondered what to do with himself. It is a fun song and a sad one, often in the same breath. What strikes me now is that he didn't resolve the tension. He just admitted it, raised a glass to it, and kept sailing. That is a very adult thing to do.
Then there is "Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes," which holds what may be his central idea. Where you are shapes who you are. Move the boat and the view changes, and when the view changes, so do you. His other insight in that song is simpler and harder: that without our ability to laugh at all of it, we would lose our minds. I have tested this theory extensively. It holds up.
Later in life he gave us "Breathe In, Breathe Out, Move On," written in the long shadow of Katrina. Anyone on the Gulf Coast who lived through that storm understands exactly what that title means. It is not a slogan. It is a set of instructions, and on some days it was the only set of instructions that made any sense.
Buffett's philosophy, as I understand it, comes down to a few things. Take your life seriously, but not yourself. Keep your sense of humor within arm's reach, like a life jacket. Accept that some of the voyage will be magic and some of it will be tragic, and refuse to let the second cancel out the first. Stay curious about the next harbor. And when the weather turns, as it always does, breathe, adjust, and get back underway.
He kept writing and performing into his seventies, still curious, still making fun of himself, still sailing toward the next horizon. He never seemed to arrive anywhere in particular, and I don't think he ever wanted to. The going was the point.
I find that a very comforting kind of wisdom. It doesn't come carved in stone. It comes with a steel drum and a cheeseburger.
The Horizon
The horizon is a peculiar thing. You can steer for it all day and never arrive. As you move, it moves. It may be the only destination on earth guaranteed to recede at exactly your speed of advance. And yet it keeps revealing things you could not see before.
Becoming may work the same way. For much of our lives we imagine that somewhere ahead is the person we are supposed to become. Work hard enough, learn enough, choose wisely enough, and one day we will tie up in that particular harbor.
I no longer think that exists. There is no final port and no finished plan. There is no last position on the chart where someone stamps COMPLETE across your life and hands you a certificate suitable for framing. There is simply another horizon, and another opportunity to navigate.
Some of it magic. Some of it tragic. That doesn't make it a bad voyage. It makes it a life.
Becoming Popeye
So here I am, nearly 61 years underway.
The wake behind me is not especially straight. There are destinations I reached, others I abandoned, and probably a few I sailed right past without noticing they were there. The track I actually made good bears only a passing resemblance to anything I might have plotted when I first cleared the my first berthing.
That's all right. It got me here, and here is a pretty good place.
I suppose that is why Popeye makes more sense to me every year. Yoda taught me to commit. Buffett taught me to laugh and keep sailing. But it took a cartoon sailor with forearms like hams to put the whole thing in a single sentence.
I yam what I yam.
Not I am everything I could ever become. Not I have arrived. Not there is nothing left to change.
Just:
This is me.
This is my boat, my position and my weather. Those are the people aboard whom I care about. And somewhere out there is the horizon.
Maybe becoming Popeye isn't about reaching the point where you stop becoming. Maybe it's reaching the point where you know yourself well enough to navigate deliberately from here.
Take a fix. Look around. Appreciate where you are. Choose a heading. Get underway.
And every so often, look up from the chart. The destination may have changed. You may have changed. The wind certainly will.
That's navigation. There is still a hell of a lot of water ahead, and I intend to enjoy every bit of it.
Still underway.
Still becoming Popeye.
~ Eric
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