Socrates used the
phrase but did not invent it. Socrates claimed Know
thyself was written on the wall in the Oracle at Delphi. The Oracle
was considered the source of wisdom at the time but the phrase spread from Greece and
danced around different cultures for ages. It seems people have been creating
havoc for themselves for millennia by trying to place round personalities into
square social norms or square personalities into round social norms. In my
case, I will think of this phrase if I ever think to build another sailboat. My
sailboat construction project ended in a bonfire.
Sydney and frame of
the boat before we put on the outside (2006).
I started out with
modest plans for a dingy with one mast and a single sail. Starting small would let me
learn boat building skills and once built, I could learn the simplest of
sailing skills and move on from there to build bigger sailboats and ultimately
circumnavigate the globe like Magellan. The blueprints suggested it was a good project
for a Boy Scout troop so how hard could it be? I have worked construction and
have some woodworking skills. It wasn’t lack of ability that sunk the project.
To be fair my half built dingy made a nice fire.
We roasted hot dogs.
Front page of the
blueprints.
γνῶθι σεαυτόν. I am more apt to succeed at building a fire
than I am at building a boat. I am probably more apt to excel at writing a song
on the guitar than I am at building a guitar. It’s actually a tad silly that I
have a climbing blog and not one about writing music because I am way better at
playing music than I will ever be at climbing. I am not a top notch climber.
Maybe my music speaks for itself and perhaps there isn’t much to write about
the writing of music.
The
frame. The project ended after I secured the marine grade plywood on the left to the frame but I gave up before I sealed the hull. I have no photos of the fire.
I
love the idea of building my own sailboat. I dreamed of doing it for years. I
still dream of building a sailboat and sailing to sea, without a pony. What was
Lyle Lovett thinking? If I Had A Boat is
a great song but don’t to take a pony out to sea. Horses evolved on the
savannahs and steppes but horses may not have been Lyle Lovett’s main point of
the song. Kiss my ass I’ve got a boat and I’m heading out to sea. Ole
Lyle was talking about dreams and horses and boats are metaphors. When dreams
die, dreamers die with them. Listen to the song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4evzpIVnMVs .
To be
fair to Magellan, nobody will ever circumnavigate the globe like he did.
Magellan sailed around the world without a map for most of it and he did so in
spite of an ecclesiastic chorus singing that the earth was flat. God said the
earth was flat. Modern climate change deniers didn’t invent crazy. We will
always have people that are intentionally ignorant of basic facts.
I
think it’s important to be fair to reality even if it hurts. To be fair to
reality, I will never sail around the world and will count it success if I ever
sail around Mendenhall Lake. The world is round even though the pope
disagreed for centuries. Climate change is real even if it means we have some
hard work ahead of us. The earth wasn’t built in 6 days. All those dinosaur
bones weren’t placed in the ground by Satan to tempt us to disbelieve Genesis.
Magellan had more guts than I will ever have.
Ultimately,
I burned my sailboat project to ashes because I was long on dreams and short on
follow-through. I didn’t think about the fact that I would rather spend the day
hiking than sanding the hull of a boat. If I ever sail out to sea it’s going to
be in a boat that I purchased, built by somebody else. Taking that position ups
my odds of actually learning to sail. I am not going to build my own cams or
weave my own climbing rope either. I once tied my own harness from webbing. There
are instructions in Freedom of the Hills. The harness worked to catch a fall but it
wasn’t comfortable when hanging for a while. I don’t recommend it.
γνῶθι σεαυτόν. Know thyself.
No comments:
Post a Comment