Drawing Water from the Well

Recently I came across a letter that I had written to our son 14 years ago, in which I told him aboutmy fantasy of living on a freighter. The year before, my wife and I had sailed on a freighter fromOakland to Sydney, and I found it so delightful that I dreamed of living on such a vessel all year round.

Of course, my wife would never have agreed to such a scheme, but in my fantasy she liked the idea. Our imaginary freighter would call at both New York and Los Angeles, so we could periodically visit our children and grandchildren. At each port along the route we would splurge on books and good dining. At sea we would read and write and listen to music and gaze at the sea and the clouds and look for dolphins, whales, albatross, and flying fish And when we tired of that, we could converse with the other passengers or watch a DVD. We could say goodbye to cooking and cleaning and other household chores, since these would all be performed by the crew.

Note that I did not fantasize about sailing on my own yacht with its own crew. Even fantasies have their limits. While I could imagine living on a freighter, I could not imagine being rich enough to own and maintain an oceangoing yacht. On the other hand, that would have been far more likely than my wife’s ever agreeing to live on one.

As I read the letter, I realized how much I have changed in the past 14 years. First of all, there are too many things wrong with me now to be out of easy range of a doctor, to say nothing of a hospital emergency room. (Passenger-carrying freighters usually carry no more than twelve passengers, the limit permitted without a doctor on board.) Several years ago I read about a woman who sold her apartment in New York and booked a permanent berth on one of the Cunard Queens. Such cruise liners do have doctors on board. But I wouldn’t want that either.

Living on a vessel would be a retreat from every day life, and it’s the pleasures and routines of ordinary life that I want to seize today, squeezing as much from it as possible. Forgive me, dear reader, for mentioning Our Town again and the question that Emily Webb’s ghost asks the Town Manager: Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute? And he replies that maybe poets and saints do. Even though I'm neither, perhaps I can learn how to do it.

And I need to learn. When I’m washing the dishes, for example, do I appreciate the feel of the warm water on my hands, the fragile beauty of the soap suds, the sound of the rushing water? No. At least not always or even mostly. Mostly I don’t notice these sensations at all, but they will be utterly gone once I’m dead. (Indeed some of them may go before that.) Usually I perform such everyday routines automatically, without much thought. It requires practice to live intensely in the moment.

A simple Tibetan woman once asked a monk to tell her the essence of his practice. “Concentrate on your hands,” he told her, “as you draw water from the well.” So far, I haven’t found it easy to follow his advice, but since the moment is all I have, I want to do the best I can.