Finding Community at Sea

The memory is still clear in my mind as if I was living the moment rather than remembering it. The warm crystal blue water turned dark by dusk lapped in comforting patters against the hull of her body. We gathered in her cockpit, all 27 of us, shoulders grazing shoulders, ears turned away from the light wind, and into the choir of voices that filled the emptiness between us. We swayed lightly, left to right, port side to starboard. Smiles were exchanged for smiles, lighting 27 pairs of eyes like flames in the night.

Giggles floated through my lips soothing the anxious excitement that feathered throughout my body. The bodies that encircled me were quirky and weird, they were musicians and artists, they talked about saxophone symphonies, about Tolkien and Hemmingway, they were lawyers and photographers, deep sea divers and conservationists, anime enthusiasts, and fishermen.

The conversation was rich and sticky sweet; I clung to every last word, savoring the remains as they lingered in the hot air. I had felt the way I felt in this moment a few fleeting times before, but this time I felt like I was being pulled toward a center of gravity. What I was feeling at that moment was the sovereignty of community.

I was sitting aboard S/Y Argo, a 112-ft schooner with 26 new friends whose homes spanned the golden coast to the eastern seaboard. I was of the youngest on board with some of my crew mates 13 years my elder. We were the faces of Argo’s next crew who would navigate her through a transatlantic passage from the British Virgin Islands to Nice, France - roughly 4,500 nautical miles point to point. Over the course of our 70-day voyage, we would experience one another in our most elevated states like the gold-laced clouds on a backdrop of a rising moon and in our deepest depths like the darkness of the Atlantic that hid monster jaws in its pleated waves. We mourned the loss of a crew member’s loved one, double-checked our partner’s tethers to make sure they were tightly fastened as they emptied the bilges of their stomachs overboard and laughed through sinister squalls that kept us up through the morning twilight. Life on Argo stripped us of our masks leaving us naked of our false selves; we were no longer 27 individuals dependent on ourselves, we were 27 individuals dependent on the wholeness and unity of our greater collective. We thrived by accepting one another’s conditions as our own.

Ever since I retrained my sea legs into land legs, I have been in search of a community as profound. At first, I attributed Argo’s opulent community to two variables: survival needs and proximity.

• Survival needs: Safety was of our highest concern. The rules on Argo were in place to mitigate risk and when risk was unavoidable, respond efficiently in dire situations. We worked well together or we failed, there was no other option.

• Proximity: Roughly 30 people were confined to the constraints of a 112-foot sailboat. There was no means for escape and only the bare minimum means for alone time. Quick conflict resolution was necessary for preserving harmony and maintaining an environment where clear communication could be upheld.

Life on Argo and life on land seemed starkly different - and it undeniably was. I’d venture to say that in commonplace life, it is exceptionally rare for an individual to seek the most turbulent environment to insert themself in hopes of finding rich community - and I am not suggesting we do - but memories of Argo remind me about the aspects of our innate human nature that we fight daily.

While not true for all countries, the culture of individualism in the United States is potent. For beings that rely on social interactions to support their livelihood, the value placed on self-reliance is disproportionately high compared to the value placed on the collective. We learn this at birth starting with the family structures we are born into. US houses are primarily comprised of a nuclear family which emphasizes individualism and private ownership. In many cases, a household is made up of many individualistic goals instead of goals aligned with a shared vision. In a country where individualism is valued above all else, a culture of isolation has materialized. We further eternalize this ideal by building privatized public spaces and uplifting the significance of personal success.

This brings me back to my two variables.

• Survival needs: Safety is of great importance but an imminent threat is likely not consistently present. We depend on our nuclear family to meet our physiological needs and sometimes greater growth needs but we are encouraged to grow in independence as we age. We look internally to provide for ourselves more so than we look outwardly.

• Proximity: We live in households of an average of 3 to 5 family members with walls and doors that separate us. There is space between the nuclear family, extended family, and neighbors. Homes can be seen as micro silos in a greater geographic context.

The structure of the average household that extends well beyond the home leads us to believe that we can depend solely on ourselves or the nuclear family to lead a self-actualized life. The individualistic individual will inevitably find a life of loneliness under this construct. While characteristics of the United States living culture are not inherently bad, the societal pressures and systemic barriers that arise from it make it unduly challenging to build a sense of community.

The truth is that we cannot depend on the variables of survival needs and proximity to find loving communities, nor should we want to. I realized that while those two variables acted as accelerants to building community, they were not the basis for the community itself, in fact, they could have quickly deconstructed it. What those variables accelerated was our ability to meet one another with openness and recognition, our ability to meet challenges in a life-enhancing way, the ability to honor individualism in a way that supported the greater good, and most importantly, the ability to truly shed our false selves.

If you wear a mask or make yourself smaller, if you fear betrayal or being talked about behind closed doors, if you avoid confrontation out of the fear of unmendable conflict, if you feel lonely when surrounded by companions, if you use a community as a means of escape from another aspect of life, I’d argue that you are not in a community at all, but something else, an environment much less meaningful.

Finding true community is hard, especially in cultures that hinder its natural occurrence, and I am not sure I, nor anyone for that matter, knows exactly how to discover it. However, what we should all know is how to avoid false communities.

Perhaps I was lucky on Argo to find such a rich community; sometimes I feel as if I struck gold and it might be another lifetime until I find it again. In the meantime, I will spend my time crossing the oceans of individualism and collectivism searching for the land of interdependence where relationships are mutually beneficial and reciprocal. On this land, I imagine we will rely on one another for support and sustenance all while maintaining our own independence and autonomy. We will cherish our differences and strive to enhance life’s greatest joys.

Thank you for being here and thank you for reading. If you have any other thoughts on community, drop me some comments below. If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it with a friend.

See you next week!