People rarely ask me why I’m doing it. What they usually ask is where I’m going, whether I am going to some particular place, and how long I am planning on staying there. It not uncommon for people to ask some question about how I am making it happen. How do you make money for such a trip? How do you prepare the boat? Do you need any certificates? There are also the questions that say a lot about how the people asking view the world, or even what they themselves are afraid of. How about all of the storms? You’re going with someone, right, not alone? What about your job? What if you run out of water? What if you run out of fuel? And your family, they are allowing you to leave? Don’t you think the gap will look bad on your CV? Oh, so you’re just not interested in a career? Once people realise that I will answer attempt to answer all of their questions as honestly as possible, they have a lot of them. But they never ask why.
Even after thinking about it for years, I still don’t know why ‘why’ is not a major question. Maybe peoples dreams and aspirations are so similar that we don’t need to ask, because we can easily relate them to generic ones. Safety, love, family, money, recognition, fame. Or maybe sailing around the world is such a generic dream that people will project their own hypothetical motivations onto me. Maybe all people hear when I say I want to go sailing around the world is that I want to go do nothing on some tropical island somewhere, for a long time. I guess that’s a valid reason during the Norwegian winters, when most people want some comfortable escape from the cold winter anyways.
While I think it’s somewhat strange that so few people ask why, I’m also glad that they don’t. Because although I’ve tried, I don’t know how to answer in a way that is easy to understand. Once, I tried to explain that one winter morning when I woke up to find ice on the inside of our sailboat windows and walked outside into a biting winter. A thin layer of ice lay floating on the entire fjord, maybe no more than a centimetre thick. The pieces were like a giant puzzle. Small gentle waves rose and fell and it was as if I could feel the sea breathing. Another time, I tried to explain what it felt like the first time I sailed so far out I lost sight of land – quiet, peaceful, safe – and how every time I’m on land, particularly in cities, and the wind starts blowing, I get an intense feeling that I am the wrong place. I feel claustrophobic.
People get all quiet and thoughtful when I answered this, so I stopped doing it. Instead, in the rare occasion when people ask why, I simply say that I want to escape it all; materialisms, politics, fake news, greed, screentime, jealousy, comparison, complaining. If that is what people believe, then that is a half-truth that I can live with. For it is partially tre, I am attempting to escape some of these things. But it is mostly in the sense of what their escape is allowing me to discover, or rather, uncover: a childish awe for the world around us, and our unexplainable connection to nature which modern society is distancing us from.