From one-way grocery isles to plexiglass dividers between restaurant booths, we see evidence of the pandemic everywhere in our daily lives. Since 2019, the world has become a very different place. There’s a tidal free flow in and out between the conscious and unconscious, until things I hadn’t remembered in years would spill out on It’s as if the amygdala, the brain’s center of primitive emotion, becomes mesmerized and no longer represses thought snippets, memories, and occasionally, endless annoying song fragments. I have found that going to sea opens an elegiac doorway into an unexplored chamber of the mind. It was scary and joyful and the best thing I ever did, because it prepared me for my Third Act. Then, at 55, stressed and unhappy, I retired and went to sea again, on a 24-foot sloop across the Gulf of Alaska and down the Inside Passage. I went on to spend the 1980s as a professional captain, but needed to make a better financial plan for my future, so I got a job with a federal agency. So, in 1978, at age 27 I left my career as a high school science teacher and went to sea as crew on a 72-foot ketch across the Caribbean, where I found something between relief and happiness. My first husband left me three weeks after my mother’s death and I learned what numbness piled on numbness means. My whole family died early my sister in an accident, my mother two years later by suicide in her grief, and my father (later) by cancer. It wasn’t always so hard, though hardship has been no stranger to me.
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