What my son taught me while we sailed across the Atlantic

Prisoners of what it was or what it should be, fighting windmills we can’t fight with, we sometimes let life go by us, not through us.

I just came out from a discussion regarding coaching in a #VUCA world hosted by the Coaching and Mentoring Festival. During this discussion, I was invited to share my learnings about uncertainty derived from our Atlantic crossing in a sailing boat as a family. This invitation triggered other memories about our trip, very much connected with acceptance and setting expectations.

True, there is uncertainty in such an endeavor. And to compensate, there is a lot of planning and systems in place to cope with that. (I wrote a year ago an article on LinkedIn, about that: Three weeks sailing across an ocean. Lessons about living confined in a small space).

Living in the present.

A few days into our trip, which took twenty-three days, my son has asked me how much we still have until the other side. I answered that we still have about eighteen days. At that age, probably it was too much to process. Therefore, he never asked me again and took things as they were. He went on, day after day, playing, drawing, and even climbing on the walls of our cabin.

Not having expectations.

The second lesson was about setting expectations when one should not expect but accept things as they are. Our son had no expectations of how things “should” work. When we had days with large waves, we, the adults, were grinding our teeth and hoping for more comfortable seas. Our minds kept telling us that it could be different, when, as a matter of fact, it could not. At least not without some magic button that would teleport us into calmer waters. Meanwhile, he had enormous fun watching the plates flying off the dinner table on the occasion of a big wave.

Leaving the past, in the past.

Upon arrival, early in the morning, after twenty-three days of sailing, we were full of anxiety as the sailors from movies: “Land! Land!”. We woke him up while entering the long estuary into the port. He looked around and went back to sleep, saying: we’re not there yet. Once the boat docked, he joined the other kids in port and started playing as if he didn’t spend long days at sea. He did not forget the trip and cherishes to this date the experience.

Sometimes, life gives no other option but acceptance.

One day we’ve been caught by a storm, too small to be forecasted using the technology we had available. It was not the first, but it was the first with thunders and lightning. In the middle of the ocean, a sailing boat becomes a twenty-three meters high lightning bolt. We realized that there’s not much to do, but accept that it will pass in a few hours and hope we don’t get hit by a flash of lightning. Of course, I worried. I planned for the worse, but deep down, I knew there’s not much to do.

So what?