5. Numbered Days
How do we fill our days?
For some of you — readers who still work to earn a living— your days are filled for you, by your employer. Automatically. A gift, really. Or so the rest of us would have you believe, to keep you contributing to the social security fund Marcia and I are busy draining.
For the rest of us —readers who are retired — filling our day is a choice.
Marcia promised to write you about this — how we are spending our three month stay in California — but she is a week late, and I am stepping back up to the plate. My wife tells me her contribution is forthcoming. We will see. In the interim, you must make do with me.
Filling one’s day meaningfully is not a new challenge. Psalms 90:12 implores: “Teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” We count our days to make each day count. The psalms were written between the 9th and 5th centuries BCE and one would think that in the intervening 2,500+ years someone would have solved this problem of filling days well. But apparently not.
Yesterday, Jan 28, 2022, turned out to be the 24,321st day in my life, counting the day of my birth as day 1. I spent hundreds of days learning to walk, talk, and use the toilet, and I will admit to having wasted a day here and there since then. Perhaps 250 in total. (My view is that days that are only partially wasted don’t count as wasted days. I also believe peanut butter cookies that are only partially eaten don’t count, so my estimate of 250 wasted days will be low if you are the type of person who adds up wasted fractions of a day or portions of cookies.)
How did I fill this day? Day number 24,321? Was it worth counting?
I went sailing. I drove down to the Cal sailing club, where I learned to sail 52 years ago, at age 14, when my father took a sabbatical in Berkeley. I have included a picture of me from that period - 1969. The photo speaks for itself.
Today, the Cal Sailing Club is a relaxed scene, with a few dinghies out on the water and a handful of “regulars” perched on bleachers. The regulars chat with each other and critique the skippers maneuvering their boats. Fishing is not really about the fish, and sailing, at least at the Cal sailing club, is not really about sailboats. Sailing is about stories —tales of how so-and-so got back to the dock after this-or-that piece of the boat came loose in the middle of the bay with the wind whipping up and the tide running out.
Passing the sailing club skipper’s test wasn’t that difficult. But I did have to force a capsize and right the boat, which meant I had to wear a wetsuit because the water in the bay is only 53 F. I had never worn a wetsuit before. A wetsuit tightens up one’s figure — it’s spandex on steroids — and I imagined I looked pretty good in it, like some svelte superhero. When I returned to the dock one of the regulars on the bleachers suggested I not wear it inside out next time, which took a little wind out of my sails.
The good news was that the regulars are all mathy-physics-nerdy types like me, and I expect to be up on the bleachers in short order. Paul K, a naval architect, was happy to explain wave dynamics in the bay to me, while Peter J, a physicist, warned me that Paul K. didn’t really understand wave dynamics but it would be good if I humored him by listening.
Later, I taught sailing lessons to novices: I started with a 20-year-old from Oregon who was living out of his truck. He wanted to learn to sail and drove all the way from Portland to Berkeley because he heard the wind was better. He was followed by a French student earning her masters in mechanical engineering, who had skipped the programs in Paris because she wanted to see America. Before I could pick up a third student, and a third story, the tide had dropped to +1 (too low for our centerboards) and the sun was sinking behind the San Francisco skyline.
It was a full day.
More to come.
Paul