Sailing Through Mid-life

Envy is toxic.

In its worst manifestations, envy leads to turf battles, violence, even wars. In the insignificant little lives most of us lead, envy can be a huge distraction from our inner nature, leading us down paths that do nothing to satisfy our deepest desires.

But in teeny little doses? Paracelsus, the 16th century physician, said that “solely the dosage determines that a thing is not a poison”. Taking a cue from him, I allowed myself to spend one lazy afternoon examining the nature of my envies, where they arose, how deep they were.

A full list of diagnostics would be tedious, but also irrelevant, because I came to realise that the only source of envy that moves my needle now is time spent in the outdoors. When I read of people kayaking in northern fjords, bike-packing across Alaska, or swim-trekking* in the Adriatic, that’s when the little green monster of envy rises up from my navel and screams, “I Wanna, Wanna, Wanna!”

Growing up in socialist India, the only adventure travel to which one had access was in the Himalaya. And though I was never attracted by the prospect of roping myself up to cling to icy Himalayan slopes, I did full justice to its winding, rocky trails - trekking to distant valleys, sleeping in caves and under rocks, sharing stone shacks with farting mules, and pilgrim sheds with ill-clad brethren. I watched meteor showers from a high bugyal, and stood transfixed by the full moon rising over the Gaumukh glacier.

Then, as India began to open up after the economic reforms of 1991 - ever so slowly - the frontiers of my adventure began receding and fading. In 1996, I took my first scuba dive ever, in the Red Sea, off the Israeli resort town of Eilat. With the turn of the century, the world seemed to shrink, become more accessible. A German modern dancer I met in Edinburgh turned out to be a skilled sailor. Together with his Irish wife and their infant son, we rented a small yacht, to spend two weeks sailing Greek islands, swimming and rowing in the day, and drinking cheap wine in little fishing harbours after sundown.

One of my favorite columnists, Janan Ganesh*, wrote in the Financial Times, “in my twenties, these tours would have been far beyond my means. Later in life, they might be beyond my physical capacity.” Though he was writing about enduring the equatorial heat of Malaysia, this could have been me writing about snorkelling in the Galapagos, diving off Bali, or cycling from Zurich to Munich.

Mid-life is not a crisis - this is the main thrust of his column. Rather, it is an opportunity to relish the sweet spot when you possess both the money to traverse the world and the energy to relish it. Janan Ganesh is 43, and though the quarter-century longer I have spent on the planet may disqualify me from being labelled ‘middle-aged’, these are my sentiments exactly - definitions be damned.

One must say a prayer to Grace for finding oneself in this sweet spot, for randomness rules the world, most of all in the defining lottery of birth - of genes and nurture. But I say that prayer several times a day, and then allow myself to be overtaken by that other reviled emotion, Greed.

Like my envy, this is my one remaining greed, to immerse myself in nature. Not just with my eyes, and ears, and heart, as I do in my mountain home, but with the whole of my being, with pounding heart, and heaving breath, with salt water in my nose and the sight of a reef shark in the dappled light of late afternoon.

As long as I can push the envelope of energy, I will coax it into coral gardens under turquoise waters, or climb to high meadows where I can loosen the moorings of the built world, and yield to fantasy and pure delight.

*https://www.ft.com/content/53d69720-28e1-409b-acee-284bef970711