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Book Review Pro | Karen Pool
Book Review Pro | Karen Pool
Author : Richard Bode
Another of my all-time favorites. You may not be interested in sailing. This book is a wonderful example of writing your life story around something that you love. It packs a healthy dose of wisdom about life within its pages and how sailing terms teach us much about living. This book hit shelves in the mid-1990s, and has been a treasured favorite among readers. I read in during a time when stillness was elusive and I was struggling to create space for stillness and meditation. Richard tells his story, looking back on his childhood and reflecting on what sailing taught him about making choices, adapting to change, and growing up.
“I sat in the center of the dinghy, facing the stern, my destination somewhere behind me, a landfall I couldn’t see. I had to judge where I was headed from where I had been, an acquired perception that has served me well—for the goals of my life haven’t always been visible points of light on a shore that looms in front of me. They are fixed in my imagination, shrouded and indistinct, and I detect them best when my eyes are closed. All too often I am forced to move toward them backward, like a boy in a rowboat, guiding myself by an inner sense of direction which tells me I’m on course.”
Richard tells of his experience with stillness when he had to wear a plaster cast from chest to toes for six months following hip surgery: “Day after day, as I lay in my enforced idleness, I thought deeply about who I was, where I came from, and what I wanted to be. There is a secret to stillness. From this place of calm arises an awareness that is far more acute than when we’re plunging mindlessly through life. What we lose in motion we gain in insight, which is a movement of another kind.”
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