A shift by degrees
At the helm, 1981.
Growing up, my dad ran a sailing center school on Boston Harbor, two blocks from our fourth-floor apartment in the North End.
But “ran a sailing center,” doesn’t really convey the degree to which my father knows ocean, boats, and wind.
My dad can (and has, through a mid-Atlantic hurricane in the 70s) navigate his way across the Atlantic with only a sextant. He can patiently answer any question involving weather, planets, or math, which we regularly send his way: Could you ride a bicycle on Mars? Explain the Gulf Stream.
With this kind of rigor, it may come as no surprise that sailing trips were not ambling pleasure cruises but feats of speed and calculation. How precisely could we trim the sails, how quickly could we arrive?
My father used a divider and parallel rules to plot our course across giant navigational charts, then mapped it to a specific compass heading. Calculation complete, he’d call out to me at the helm.
“Jo!” he’d say, “Steer 242.” Gripping the tiller, I’d make subtle adjustments to keep the half orb of the compass centered on our heading.
I developed an early appreciation for how even the smallest, most undetectable shift can change an entire trajectory. When you’re navigating across an ocean, a few degrees to the North could be the difference between, say, Halifax and Miami.
Turns out all of this nautical talk has surprising resonance in life. Your nervous system knows that real growth happens by degrees: Whatever changes you incubate here, no matter how small or undetectable, sets your course to a different land entirely - a place where other things are possible.
Which can be a difficult thing to remember, in the middle of a storm. In times of turmoil, we tend to batten down the hatches and stay the course (so many boat metaphors!) rather than shifting our orientation. After all, didn’t we make it this far doing it the same old way?
We did, and yet. If we want to move to more habitable waters, we may need to change an approach that locks down in order to make it through. Despite how loud this moment is, remembering the longer arc of our unfolding life opens a different route.
Craniosacral practitioner Susan Raffo writes that our work is to help folks “imagine just two cells wider than what today feels like. What if? What if?” We aren’t here to push an agenda or yank away patterns that got you this far. Instead, we practice a small deviation from where we’ve been pointing, a tiny, manageable shift.
It’s a subtle practice, but it changes everything.
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