Stop Drifting, Start Rowing Read online

  ALSO BY ROZ SAVAGE

  ROWING THE ATLANTIC:

  Lessons Learned on the Open Ocean

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  Hay House India: www.hayhouse.co.in

  Copyright © 2013 by Roz Savage

  Published and distributed in the United States by: Hay House, Inc.: www.hayhouse.com® • Published and distributed in Australia by: Hay House Australia Pty. Ltd.: www.hayhouse.com.au • Published and distributed in the United Kingdom by: Hay House UK, Ltd.: www.hayhouse.co.uk • Published and distributed in the Republic of South Africa by: Hay House SA (Pty), Ltd.: www.hayhouse.co.za • Distributed in Canada by: Raincoast: www.raincoast.com • Published in India by: Hay House Publishers India: www.hayhouse.co.in

  Cover design: Amy Rose Grigoriou • Interior design: Pamela Homan

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic recording; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or otherwise be copied for public or private use—other than for “fair use” as brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews—without prior written permission of the publisher.

  The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Savage, Roz.

  Stop drifting, start rowing : one woman’s search for happiness and meaning alone on the Pacific / Roz Savage.

  pages cm.

  ISBN 978-1-4019-4262-5 (pbk.)

  1. Savage, Roz—Travel. 2. Rowers—United States—Biography. 3. Women rowers—United States—Biography. 4. Rowing—Pacific Ocean. I. Title.

  GV790.92.S263 A3 2013

  797.12’3—dc23

  [B]

  2013026755

  Tradepaper ISBN: 978-1-4019-4262-5

  16 15 14 13 4 3 2 1

  1st edition, October 2013

  Printed in the United States of America

  “It is easier to sail many thousands of miles through cold and storms and savage cannibals … than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific ocean of one’s being alone.”

  — HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: Dream Big, Change Your Life

  Chapter 1: Facing and Embracing Failure

  Chapter 2: The Kindness of Strangers

  Chapter 3: Ultimate Flexibility

  Chapter 4: The Universe Will Provide

  Chapter 5: We Create Our Future

  Chapter 6: I Am Not My Thoughts

  Chapter 7: One World

  Chapter 8: Do Not Look Outside Yourself for the Leader

  Chapter 9: Achievement

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  Dream Big, Change Your Life

  “Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one’s life.”

  — KATE CHOPIN, THE AWAKENING

  If you rotate a globe until your view centres on Hawai’i, you will see a mostly blue view of our planet, a vast expanse of ocean barely besmirched by land. There is just a sliver of California visible in the top right corner, a glimpse of Australia in the bottom left, and a smattering of islands and atolls strewn like grain flung by a celestial farmer. The Pacific covers 65 million square miles, about a third of the world’s surface. In places the water is nearly six miles deep, although mostly it’s only about two miles deep. Not that it really matters to me. As soon as it’s more than 5’4” deep, I’m out of my depth.

  From 2007 to 2010, this water world was my home, as I inched my way, oar stroke by oar stroke, from California to Papua New Guinea to become officially the first woman to row solo across the Pacific. My stated goal was to use my adventure to wage a campaign of awareness and action on the most important environmental issues facing our world today, communicating my message through blog posts and podcasts from the ocean, and through speaking and writing once I was back on dry land.

  Yet just a few years earlier, nothing could have been further from my mind than fighting the good green fight from the deck of a 23-foot rowboat. Crank the clock back to the year 2000, and you would find me age 32 and living in London, supposedly happy. I had a well-paid job, a big house, a successful husband, foreign holidays, and a little red sports car. In other words, I had the classic materialistic Western lifestyle.

  My childhood had been austere as the elder daughter of two low-paid Methodist preachers. My father’s quarterly stipend did not allow luxuries, so my mother grew fruit and vegetables to stretch her housekeeping allowance and made clothes for my sister and me with her sewing machine and knitting needles. As a teenager I had grown restless with this spartan lifestyle, and I yearned for a time when I would have money to spend, designer clothes to wear, and a big house to live in. After 11 years of chasing that dream in the City of London, I’d acquired everything that I had thought would make me happy.

  But there was something wrong. The truth was that, despite all these material blessings, I wasn’t happy—not happy at all. There was a persistent and ever-increasing feeling that there was a mismatch between the person I was and the person I was pretending to be. The tension between the two selves was becoming unbearable.

  What brought it home to me was a self-help exercise I did one day. I sat down at the dining-room table and wrote two versions of my own obituary—the one I wanted, and the one I was heading for if I carried on as I was. They were very different, and I saw that I was moving in completely the wrong direction if I was going to be able to look back and be proud of my time on Earth. I realized then that I needed to make a major course correction if I was ever to find happiness and meaning in my life.

  That exercise was the first, irrevocable step on a path that would take me away from all I had held dear—my husband, my house, and my sense of security. I would also have to let go of all the things that were cluttering my mind—the possessions that had come to own me instead of the other way round, the preoccupation with what other people thought of me rather than what I thought of myself, and the voices in my head that questioned whether I dared to be different.

  This may sound like a painful process, but at each point of the transformation I was moved to undertake, something would happen to indicate to me that I was on the right track. What might have looked like sacrifices actually felt like liberations.

  LEAVING MY HUSBAND WAS THE FIRST, and most difficult, part of the journey. I had married for love and for life, and even though the 11-year relationship was faltering, it took a long, hard struggle with my conscience before I reluctantly acknowledged that only one course of action felt right. In my heart I knew that for as long as I was with him, I could not truly flourish. I needed to escape my gilded cage to find out what lay outside—but that prospect terrified me.

  Confused and indecisive, I took an old school friend into my confidence. I agonized over whether I should really leave him as my friend and I sat sipping wine at her house. She asked me repeatedly, “What do
you want?” It was at once the simplest and the most difficult question I’d ever been asked. I had grown up to think in terms of what I should do, or what was expected, not what I wanted. I simply did not know the answer—or maybe did not want to admit that I knew, because that would require me to act on it.

  While debating my options yet again with my ever-patient friend, I confided that I was afraid to be alone, particularly as I got older. What she said next changed my life.

  She told me, “I can imagine you, me, and Steph [another old friend] sitting around the kitchen table when we’re 60 years old, eating ice cream out of the tub and putting the world to rights.”

  With that one image she made me realize that there are many forms of companionship, that mutual support does not exist only in the context of a marriage, and that I no longer needed to fear being a single woman. I realized that what I actually wanted was to start over, to free myself from my existing boundaries to find out who I really was and what would make me happy—not what would make my parents or my friends or my husband happy, but me.

  After long and tear-filled discussions, in 2002 my husband and I agreed that we had arrived at a parting of the ways, and I moved out. I didn’t take much with me, and even those few possessions I soon sold. I had put my things into storage, and one day when I was there to retrieve something, I looked around the unit and realized that this stuff was no longer important to me. Outside the context of a home, these superfluous clothes, ornamental knick-knacks, and even my beloved books had become a hindrance.

  I loaded up my camper van to the roof with these relics of my previous life, and drove to a car-boot sale (a kind of yard sale, where people show up and sell all manner of things out of the back of their cars). As I was parking, even before I opened the sliding door at the back of the van, people were pushing and elbowing, waiting to see what riches might lie within.

  In all honesty, there was nothing of real value at all, but I rapidly discovered that one person’s junk is another person’s treasure, and that if you are willing to sell it cheaply enough, you can get rid of just about anything. A few hours later I had nothing left but a few books and garments that I donated to charity. I hadn’t sold my things for financial gain—I only made a meagre £200 (about $300) for a vanload of stuff—but I felt so much lighter and freer without all the baggage.

  I had let go of a lot—emotional attachments, material possessions, and most important, my fear of the unknown. I had launched myself into the abyss without looking before I leaped, and I found that rather than being a void, it was in fact a fascinating place, chock-full of potential.

  I spent several months simply enjoying my newfound freedom. By not being too fussy about where I lived, I was able to keep my financial overheads to a minimum. I earned a trickle of money from photography and selling my home-baked cakes at a farmers’ market, and this was enough to keep me afloat while I read books, met people, relished serendipitous conversations, and wrote in my journal. I was surfing on a wave of discovery, and every day I found new ways to be joyful.

  But once again I became restless. Since my liberation, I had learned many new things about life and how to live it, but now I needed a purpose. I am a goal-driven person, and once my driving motivation was no longer to make money and acquire possessions, I needed some other objective to take its place. I had learned a lot about how to be happy, but I needed more. I needed meaning.

  I tried to identify the root cause of this imperative to find some reason for my existence. I considered the possibility that it might be because both my parents had a vocation to preach the Christian gospel, so maybe I’d internalized at an early age the importance of having a purpose in life. But my hunch is that we all, deep down, desire meaning in our lives, irrespective of our parents or our circumstances. We don’t want to accept that our time on this planet is ephemeral and pointless. We cringe away from Thomas Hobbes’s dictum that life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. We want to find intimacy, beauty, harmony, and inner peace, and to impart an enduring legacy, leaving this world a better place than we found it. This instinct may be buried deeper in some than in others, but I believe that it exists in all human beings if we search deeply enough. Whether or not life has objective meaning, subjectively we want to make it so.

  I had figured out this much when I had my environmental epiphany.

  I SHOULD FIRST OF ALL EXPLAIN MY PREVIOUS ATTITUDE towards the environment. As a child, I had some awareness that humankind was treading heavily upon the Earth, although of course I would not have phrased it in such precocious terms. Given their religious inclination, my parents saw nature as an expression of God’s goodness, and they had instilled in me an appreciation of the natural world. My father was fascinated by the stars and planets, and devoured books on astronomy and physics. My mother’s focus was rather more down-to-earth, in every sense. She took my younger sister and me on long walks and bicycle rides in the countryside, and taught us the names of birds, trees, and wildflowers. We were also taught never ever to drop litter. My parents would tut disapprovingly if we saw someone dropping a wrapper in the street, or came across a mess of fast-food containers and empty soda bottles littering the pavement. It was important to look after our environment, in the very local and immediate sense of the word, and they impressed upon me and my sister that to do otherwise was a crime most heinous.

  Yet my sense of connection to nature seemed to come from somewhere deeper than my parents’ obsession with litter. I can clearly recall as a child looking out from the back window of our boxy white 1966 Triumph 1200, admiring the neat patchwork of fields checkering the English countryside, and despising the incursion of the hideous electricity pylons that marched relentlessly across the landscape like enormous invaders from a hostile alien army. To my young mind, it just didn’t seem right. We humans seemed to be making the world an uglier place, not a better one.

  When I left home to go to university in 1986 and then to work in London in 1989, I lost touch with that appreciation of nature, which came to seem childish. I began worshipping at the altar of the new god called money. The other one, the God of my parents, became largely irrelevant to my fast-paced city lifestyle. My world was all about the pursuit of material possessions. Having lived in grimly functional church manses for my first 18 years, I now became an arch-materialist, the kind of woman who would rip out a perfectly adequate kitchen in order to install the latest fashionable units. I never even thought about where stuff went when I threw it “away.” Household waste went into a black plastic sack, and the binmen took it. Building debris went into a skip, and that, too, went away. Rubbish disappeared from sight, never to be seen or thought of again. It vanished, conveniently and completely.

  But that blinkered view of the world was about to change. I had taken advantage of a friend’s offer to stay in her family’s cottage in a hamlet outside Sligo on the west coast of Ireland. It was February 2004 when I arrived at the small, pebble-dashed cottage, and the day was cold and blustery. A wrought-iron gate bisected a low, whitewashed front wall, its balustrades the only ornamental flourish in an otherwise starkly plain façade. Three or four shrubs, wintry and leafless, dotted the lawn of the front garden. A narrow concrete path ran straight from the gate to the grey front door. Two small, square windows at the front of the house peered out like eyes from beneath the overhanging eaves of the tiled roof. A couple of irregularly placed chimneys marred the symmetry.

  I stepped through the front door and into a time warp, straight back to the 1950s. The furniture in the living room was simple—a dining table with a patterned plastic tablecloth, four dining chairs, a long low sofa, three uncomfortable-looking chairs with wooden arms, and a sideboard with sliding frosted-glass doors, behind which I could see the hazy outlines of stacks of plates and bowls. An electric eternal flame flickered under the sacred heart decoration on the high mantelpiece above the stove, which also bore a small collection of ornaments arranged symmetrically: two artificial roses in crystal vases, t
wo brass candlesticks, and two ceramic pots shaped like hens sitting on wicker baskets. The decor was basic and unpretentious. It was perfect for my purposes.

  I was there for a self-imposed retreat. I intended to pay penance for the excesses of the Christmas season by eating simply and abstaining from alcohol and caffeine. My rucksack, presently sitting in the small hallway beneath the coat pegs, was half full of books, mostly lent to me by friends, on philosophy, spirituality, and religion. I planned to meditate, enjoy long walks, and take time to be with myself and see what ideas might emerge. Over the course of the coming month I did indeed lose weight, regain my fitness, improve my focus during meditation, and read prodigiously.

  As it turned out, the fairly random selection of books in my rucksack would combine to change my life. Amongst them was Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn, which uses the literary device of a telepathic gorilla to describe humanity’s behaviour from the perspective of an intelligent but nonhuman onlooker. It questions the wisdom of our shortsighted determination to eradicate our natural competitors for food, to the detriment of the planet and, ultimately, of ourselves.

  I went on to read Conversations with God, by Neale Donald Walsch, which gave me permission to put behind me the modest, self-effacing spirituality of my parents and dare to be, as he put it, “the grandest version of the greatest vision you ever had of yourself,” not as an act of selfishness, but as a duty and an obligation to contribute to the collective evolution of humankind.

  It was into the fertile ground prepared by these books that the seed of The Hopi Survival Kit was sown. It described the prophecies of the Hopi tribe and their belief that these are now coming true. The predictions consist of a sequence of signs that the end of a civilization is approaching, and a new era is coming. The first sign is a “gourd of ashes” falling from the sky. The Hopi interpreted this occurring when the atom bomb fell on Hiroshima. Since then, they have regularly sent a delegation to the United Nations to issue an urgent call to action.