What the North Sea Has Taught Me
Hello everyone,
I'm a fisherman out on the North Sea, off the coast of Scotland. Most of my time is spent at sea alone, but every now and then I’m on land for a couple of weeks and find myself being drawn into all the bad news in the world, corruption, hatred, politics and so on.
Even though I still get the news on the boat (I have TV, internet and radio), it just doesn’t seem to hit as hard. I look out at the vast ocean and see nobody, not even another boat most of the time.
Some people would find this total isolation difficult and might not like feeling so alone, but I’ve come through a life of depression, anxiety, hardships and breakdowns. I grew up in a small village in Turkey, brought up by my grandma who had no money at all.
Food was grown or foraged. Many meals were dried fruit or vegetables from the summer before, and many things were full of maggots. As a child, I was told to eat them as a source of protein, but I always spent time picking them all out.
Forgive my English if this does not flow perfectly. I love the English language but am still learning it.
I suppose the sea has taught me calmness, mindfulness, if you like. At times the weather can change in an instant and the boat can roll onto its side from left to right. Finding something to hold onto can be impossible, and I have broken bones in those moments. Yet at other times the sea is like a mill pond, the sun is setting, and it’s the most incredible sight in the world.
A bit like life really, one minute everything is perfect, the next everything is turned upside down.
The ocean has stopped me thinking too far ahead. I used to try to predict what would happen, think everything would be fine and I’d come back with a big catch, or that everything would go wrong and I wouldn’t come back at all.
But after years, I started to realise that I was never right. It would be whatever it would be, and I had absolutely no control over it.
The ocean has taught me that nothing in the past can be changed, and thinking about it and playing it over and over again makes no difference whatsoever, it only kept me in a state of anxiety.
The feeling of loneliness that I used to experience out at sea has gone. I stand on the deck and look up at the stars or the clouds and feel part of this universe. The ocean has taught me how to flow with the tide and not try to go against it. The ocean has taught me never to try to predict an outcome. The ocean has taught me to just be.
I don’t know how this post will read. I’m not sure if it’s even allowed on Reddit. I’ve written this out at sea as a storm around me is growing. Uploading it has taken forever as the internet signal keeps coming and going, but all I am trying to say is this:
When you let the path open for you instead of trying to force it open yourself, everything turns out okay, and it usually isn’t how you tried to predict it would turn out.
