Letting go of the line
There is one specific moment I still think about more than almost anything else from those years at sea. Not the start gun. Not the crowd on the dock. Not even the first mile out of the harbour. It is the second you untie the mooring line, throw it back onto the dock, and power the yacht out, straight into the unknown, no idea what is waiting for you in the weeks to come.
That is the moment it actually hits you. There is no way back. Turning around is still physically possible, of course, but it stops being what you came here to do. The next rope you tie will be on the other side of the world. Cape Town is behind you. Rio is somewhere out there, weeks away, with nothing solid to hold onto in between.
I remember exactly what it felt like, a strange sense of floating, standing on a yacht that was already moving, already committed, the harbour getting smaller behind you and nothing but ocean ahead. Not the tension of wanting to run, but the tension of a decision whose outcome you simply do not know yet. I remember crossing the start line, the bow pointed straight at the open water, and thinking, there we go, into the unknown. You have just made a decision that cannot really be undone.
I had felt that exact sensation once before, on land, with no ocean anywhere near me. I had a secure corporate job at the time, a suit, a tie, a salary I had no real complaints about. I hated the job itself, properly hated it, every single day of it. One morning I was driving to the office, and I looked up into the rearview mirror. The man staring back at me had neatly combed hair and a sharp suit, and he was not me. He was a puppet, someone else pulling the strings, and I had no idea when I had let that happen. I still drove to work that day, walked in, and handed in my notice. On my last day, I threw the suit away, threw the tie away, and drove home straight into my own unknown, with no idea what was waiting for me in the years to come, not the weeks, years.
That was its own mooring line, and I remember untying it with that same tension, the not knowing, rather than any wish to turn back. No safety net, no guaranteed income, no easy way back into the suit if it did not work out, because I had already thrown it away.
What strikes me now, looking back at both moments, is how similar the physical sensation actually was, even though one happened on an ocean and the other in a car park outside an office building. Your chest tightens in the same way. Your thoughts go quiet in the same way, the way they do right before something significant, when there is nothing left to plan and only the doing remains. I think we assume big decisions should feel different depending on their size, that quitting a job should feel smaller than crossing an ocean. It does not. The body does not seem to measure decisions by scale. It measures them by whether there is a way back or not, and once that door closes, the feeling is remarkably similar whether you are standing on a dock or sitting in traffic.
Most people never create that feeling on purpose. We keep at least one hand on some kind of line, a job we know, a routine we trust, a version of ourselves familiar enough to feel like solid ground, always there if we need it. There is nothing wrong with that, I have done it myself, longer than I probably should have. Most of the time that hand on the line is not cowardice, it is just sensible. You cannot burn every bridge on principle. But every so often the line stops being a safety net and starts being the thing keeping you exactly where you already are.
Something happens when you genuinely let go, when going back stops being the easiest option and the only thing left is to see what comes next. You do not need an ocean for that. Sometimes you simply have to let go of the thing that has always felt like solid ground, without knowing exactly what you are going to hold onto instead. That is the uncomfortable part. But perhaps that is also where the interesting part begins, the part where you actually find out what you are capable of, rather than assuming you already know because the line was always there to catch you.
