Looking forward, looking aft: who was I, who am I, who will I become

Port Townsend Washington, 20 November 2020 – On Monday, the day after tomorrow, I’ll fly to Atlanta to work on my house there.

I’ll be flying on an Alaska Airlines buddy pass, courtesy of Grayson on X-Wing.

My life has changed. I’ve become so integrated into the sailing community that people don’t have last names anymore, just the name of the vessel they sail on.* It’s very much like the German or Dutch von or the French du, or even how Italian names came into existence as the place where they are from, my original surname, Giuliano, from the province of Giulia, which is no longer inside the Italian borders.

In giving me these buddy passes, Grayson told me I had to fly dressed appropriately, no ripped jeans.

Who am I now? When I lay in bed this morning visualizing my trip to Atlanta, I thought about what luggage I would take – I figured this old Jansport backpack that we picked up on the giveaway table in a harbor someplace would carry everything I need. And then thought about how I used to travel until just a couple of years ago.

Starting about 30 years ago, I flew in a suit, a sincere blue, made-to-measure, American-made suit, a pair of Britsh-made cap-toe shoes, a cotton made-to-measure white shirt, an Hermés tie, and cufflinks. I got my hair cut every six weeks by the same man in Buckhead. If there was no connecting flight I would take carry on, otherwise, I would check the bag. At the height of my travel, someone from the crew would find me, tell me how much they appreciated having me as a passenger, and ask if there was anything I’d like.

It’s been two years since I last left the country by plane, six since I’ve been in Europe; I used to spend a week a month there.

The luggage I flew with was a bag that Delta gave me when I crossed a million miles with them.

When we came home from sailing this year, and I unpacked the clothes that we keep here in Port Townsend. I came across three of those sincere blue suits, what must be close to a dozen of the white shirts, but I can’t for the life of me figure out where a pair of leather shoes are.

Sometime in late December, probably December 22, it will be one year since I last had my hair cut. COVID is one reason, my haircutter of 38 years has died is the second, and it was always hit or miss to find anyone else who could cut my hair so that I didn’t look like either Bozo the clown or the Shah of Iran.

These last few years have been sailing or preparing to sail. Preparing to sail can involve months somewhere else getting a house ready to be sold, or to have new tenants. But it was all in preparation to go sailing. Clothes, and looking successful, completely dropped off the radar. Looking successful was once the goal: the instructions that I gave to my haircutter were, make me look successful. Impression management, in the business I was in, was a very large part of success. By the end of my career, if you didn’t know who I was, then you were not a prospect for my services: having the look of success, whether it was true or not, was necessary to charge those rates.

Now my inventory of clothes is bereft of a single pair of trousers that are not worn at the cuffs or have an unexpected stain somewhere.

My life transitioned away from what I looked like to what equipment was necessary to get from here to there through increasingly remote places. The time between a breakdown and when we could sit on the dock waiting for replacement parts would soon be getting to be very long indeed.

So who have I become? I pause for a long time and stare at this screen. The answer to this question is the point of this post. I, more than at any time in my life, know who I am. But the question is am I a different person than I was?

Superficially I look very different. The vast majority of people who knew me had never seen me out of a suit – I once wore a ripped pair of jeans while I set up a booth at a trade show. An industry colleague came by to check that I was okay. There was concern, even fear in his eyes looking at me dressed that way.

I don’t look that way. I would like to say I pay no attention to how I dress, but that is certainly not true. In terms of appearance, the only thing I  won’t do is wear blue jeans anymore, 50 years off-and-on is enough. I pay attention that the clothes I wear are warm, and waterproof, and that the shoes will grab the deck so I can’t slide over the side.

The question is who have I become? Not, how do I dress?

At my core, I know I am who I’ve always been. I don’t look backward and ask who that other person was? I know the real change is not who I am, it is the different environment I placed myself in. Away from ‘‘shore’’, I find the cultural, societal, and social pressures are gone.

Here in Port Townsend, I feel the pressure of current events that I cannot shift, the strife my friends express through social media that I cannot assuage, and the list of things that need attention because we have been gone for a year.

I’ve let go of all these things, or perhaps they can no longer reach me because I have run away, sailed away, motored away.

There is a tendency to look for a threshold where things changed. I look at the threshold as April 16, 2016: the day Jennifer, Hilary, and I left for the first trip up the inside passage. It is the day after I ended my relationship with my last client and called myself retired, the day I changed my LinkedIn profile to say that I was co-captain of Caro Babbo.

But there was no threshold, just an easy marker of something very visible.

I realized after I’d been with Jennifer, successfully, for a few years that it took until I was 50 years old to understand how to be in a relationship. I realized that I had an addiction to business risk. I decided I only wanted friends that I was proud to be friends with. And, feeling the social pressure to behave in a certain manner, less.

It also allowed me to have deepened friendships.

To be able to sail, how we sall and where we sail was a process that took years.

Going off sailing removed many of the outside pressures because I was physically away, because I was technologically away, and my focus rather than become more pointed became broader. The world became both abstractly, and physically 360°, rather than very narrow concerns that required my focus: a client, a project, a bid, or a sale. Stepping on deck is not only entering the sphere of the outdoors but a metaphor for living in a full space.

None of this would be possible without my relationship with Jennifer. Jennifer makes all this possible. In this relationship, it is certain that we are much more than the sum of the two of us. Neither of us would have done this alone.

So the answer to all of this seems to be that it is merely the culmination of this many years of living. Of working, even though I never realized it, towards understanding what I need and want and acquiring it, of building a platform on which this life rests. Of being able to discard those things which do not make me happy, and do not make me feel fulfilled and accomplished.

Looking backward at the funnel of life that brings any person to today, we see all the people we bumped up against who taught us things, whether or not they intended to, and whether or not we wanted to learn that thing. We especially see those who made us understand our convictions, how important they are to us, and what we will do to seek them.

I was once desperately in love with a woman. We were absolutely wrong for each other. But in twisting on the hook trying to be who I would need to be to make the relationship successful, I came to understand who I was and what my core beliefs were. I eventually understood I could never be who she needed. (I still have a certain amount of joy that she found that person.) In the heat of a wrenching fight that left us both emotionally gutted, she told me the purpose of life wasn’t to be happy.

But it is. The U.S. Constitution aside, that is, perhaps, the sole purpose of life. I do believe that over the course of the wrenching passion that was that relationship, she came to agree with me. The rapids of life toss, turn, mark and change each of us, before leaving me, at least, on calmer waters.

Who have I become? Nothing more than who I’ve always been on my way to becoming, but now with time to reflect on it. No different than the college hippie boy who cut his hair, discarded his patched jeans, and put on shoes to get paid to do something he would have willingly paid to do.

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*A wonderful exception is someone whom, to us, her last name is part of her first name: Melissa White on Galapagos.