Bobbing Metal Boxes

One of the interesting things about working on a ship is that occasionally, your entire workplace moves – not just the people and the office name, but the actual workplace itself. It’s easy to forget, when you’re inside all the time, that you’re actually floating in a big metal box. And occasionally that box unhooks itself from dry land and heads off into the middle of the ocean, alone and unafraid.

I love the ocean. I love the sound of the waves; I love going out onto the bridge wing and feeling the breeze on my face; I love being able to scan the horizon in all directions and see nothing but sea and sky. And if you think that a country meadow is good for stargazing, you haven’t been in the middle of the ocean with darken ship set and nothing but the sound of the waves and the taste of sea air around you. It’s magical.

One of the disadvantages, however, is that you’re at work. You’re physically at your workplace for days, weeks, even months on end, with no place to go and no place you’re really alone. For an introvert, that thought is very daunting. At least if you have cabin fever, you can leave the cabin; on a ship, you’re very much stuck. You live with your boss and your boss’s boss and your coworkers and your subordinates, and there’s always more work to be done.

You’re standing watch day and night, so you have no normal schedule. You sleep for a few hours, wake up, stand watch, sleep for another couple hours, do work, sleep for another hour, stand watch… and on it goes, like one very, very long day that doesn’t have a clear beginning or end. Sometimes you can go days without being outside, without doing anything that’s not work-related. It just seems to swallow you up sometimes; word becomes your whole world, and it’s easy to lose perspective.

But now we come to one of the reasons I love the ocean. Because every time work seems to be swallowing me up, robbing me of my peace of mind and burning me out, I can just close my eyes and feel the waves rocking the ship. And when I do that, I remember that this isn’t the whole world. It’s just a tiny metal box bobbing in the middle of the ocean. The real world is out there – and however much I may dislike work at the moment, the real world is still a wondrous, marvelous place.

The metaphor has become very literal for me, but it applies to all of us. We’re all, in fact, floating – on continents that float on the earth’s mantle, or on the earth itself whizzing through the vacuum of space. We build up our little kingdoms and we think they’re solid and steadfast and we start to get swallowed up by our own ambitions – or our own worries. But in the end, it’s all transient. It’s all unstable. It could all be gone in an instant. They’re just little metal boxes floating on the sea.

And the stability of metal boxes has exceedingly little to do with their size or their weight or how many missiles they can shoot or aircraft they can launch. It has everything to do with the relationship between the boat and the ocean, and how the two interact. At the risk of sounding extremely cliché, it’s all about balance. And for me, balance is all about perspective, all about keeping in mind the larger picture, seeing the ocean and not just the boat.

What is the larger picture? A lot of self-help books will tell you it’s family, or relationships, or simple acts of kindness, or self-fulfillment, or health, or sex, or a hundred other things. And all of those have a part to play. But they’re all just grasping in the dark. I think I have more than that; I think I have, not just a larger picture, but the largest picture, the objective framework through which we should view all else. This is, of course, the world story that I keep on mentioning, though I admit that thus far, I’ve been too lazy to actually write it down. Other people have, and probably done a better job than I could.

In short, I am not of the opinion that we should care about everything in moderation; that, to me, smacks of mediocrity and rules out heroism. What we must instead do, is ensure that we care about the right things in the right way. We must gain perspective. With perspective come balance and stability. And once we have balance and stability, we can steer our metal boxes in the right direction, and hopefully keep from allowing them to swallow us up.

Photo of USS Roosevelt (DDG 80) by United States Navy