It's a voyage...

FEW people get to navigate at sea these days… not the old way, with chronometer and sextant, compass, sight reduction tables, the Nautical Almanac, dividers, slide rules and Admiralty charts. It was complicated: part art, mostly science and a lot of experience, judgment and finesse. And the weather has a bit to do with it. But the satisfactions could be wonderful.

Then there's a more intuitive approach, called “dead reckoning”. One of the fascinating things about dead reckoning is the accuracy that’s achieved when enough random errors get added together. The more estimates there are and the more genuinely random they are, the greater the overall accuracy.

Increasingly, I’ve come to see life as a lesson in dead reckoning. We will none of us be in the same place tomorrow as we are today, no matter how much we might want to avoid the future. We’re all adrift in the light-filled boundlessnesses of mystery. Certainties are more apparent than real, and the currents of life carry us endlessly towards the horizon.

For a long time, I've been fascinated by non-Western navigational methods, and enthralled by the Polynesian story.

There are accounts in the logs of early whaling ships of captains being surprised that, without looking at a compass or chart, Polynesian crewmen could reliably indicate the direction in which their home island lay. They were not just the inheritors of a skill but, in very important ways, the creations of it.

In what was really a fairly short time, while Jason and his Argonauts were timidly coast-hugging their way around the Anatolian shore, Polynesian navigators were embarked on long, deep-ocean voyages of deliberate two-way exploration, discovery and settlement, founding successful new communities on every habitable island in the eastern Pacific: an area amounting to one sixth of the earth’s surface.

It’s humanity’s most awe-inspiring feat of discovery. The summing of random errors, the re-visiting of homelands, the allure of the far horizon, the vagaries of winds and sea, the constant voyaging, the wrecks and storms and catastrophes, the hero figures and the courage, the infinity of possibilities, the discernment of what was necessary to carry with them on migration canoes and the need to be able to constantly maintain and repair their vessels at sea… all of these things had play in the grand accomplishment.

The distinctive “crab claw” sail and rig of Polynesia, for example, made the canoes exceptionally manoeuvrable. The voyagers used cordage of varying strengths in lashings and stitchings to hold sail panels together so that, though a sudden gust might snap the weaker bindings, the matting of the sails could be re-stitched and irreplaceable spars would be saved from snapping. Their shallow-draft canoes meant that the coral reefs surrounding most tropical Polynesian islands were either visible to them or negotiable; deep-draft European ships, on the other hand, were forever grounding on deeper reefs unseen from the surface.

The journey to each new landfall could have begun only with the heroic act of launching a big, double-hulled canoe — representing a considerable community investment — into the vast expanse of the planet’s largest body of water… a perfect, dangerous, unknowable metaphor for the absolute mystery of existence. It entailed a search for land where there was no certainty of finding any, and where no other human had previously ventured. The first heroes into space had far more information, safety systems, back-up and comfort, security and all-round support than these guys. Neil Armstrong was pretty sure there was a Moon up there. And astronauts have always had the consolation of being in fairly constant communication with “home”. But, when the Polynesian explorers left shore, they became utterly reliant on their own skills, decisions, conduct and wisdom.

They explored then found their way home to a low-lying little island in a vast expanse of ocean. Then — if new habitable land had been found — they’d settlers back to the new landfall. There, the settlers had to establish a functioning society from their own resources and with the tools and equipment and limited number of hand-picked colonists they could take with them. And this was achieved, time and time and time again.

Their secrets lay not in databanks or high technology but in wisdom, co-operation and courage. Courage has always been decisive in human affairs: the commitment to place coolly chosen values above one’s own comfort, convenience and life. Wisdom is more complicated.

The navigators recorded their sailing directions as stories that made them easier to recall. Basing their courses on zenith (overhead) star positions and “star paths” (following one rising star after the next), and supplementing this knowledge with an array of other experience-based cues — swell and wind directions, the characteristics of different winds, interference patterns in the swells, currents, bird species and the directions of their flight, fish behaviour, sea wrack, the motion of the canoe, the temperature and even the saltiness of the water on the tongue, hints of colour reflected on the underside of clouds — they voyaged.

They picked up the sweet potato from South America and saw it cultivated as a staple crop throughout tropical and subtropical Polynesia; they took coconuts from Southeast Asia where they themselves had originated and spread them across the Pacific (research has shown that coconuts could not have propagated across the Pacific by drifting: they don’t survive in salt water long enough to cover the distances). Dozens of useful plants and animals were shipped about the Pacific on big, seaworthy, ocean-going canoes. And the great navigators became the founding hero-demigods of the cultural outposts they established.

These people did not learn a set of skills to use when they were at sea. Rather, chosen individuals became navigators. Most youngsters were taught the basics: they routinely fished out of sight of their island homes and had to be able to find their way back, in much the same way as children in the modern urban West are taught basic road safety.

But a selected few who showed exceptional flair, specialised. Their every breathing moment would then be devoted, not to learning how to navigate, but how to be a navigator… in-dwelling the character and sensitivities, the awareness, the values and ways of thinking of a navigator. There are stories of their having been woken in the night and quizzed about the positions of various stars so they learned to keep track of the star paths even as they hovered in sleep. They memorised the star path stories. They would be dropped from canoes to spend long hours in the night treading water, watching the stars, feeling the wind, coming to know the ocean and overcoming their last fears of it.

Something that was always carried by the great migration canoes was a body of stories and cultural tradition. It was these poetic narratives as much as the utilitarian technology that empowered the success of the new, independent settlements. The stories and ancient lore imparted “wisdom” rather than “knowledge”. The difference is that wisdom is about discernment; knowledge is all about data. Wisdom freed the great explorers of the Pacific Ocean from needs to keep meticulous charts or develop critically precise chronometers, for want of which European knowledge-based exploration stalled in the Pacific. Wisdom was there first.

So, if we’re going to apply some of these lessons to life, we’ll need to be less concerned with always needing information and intensely analytic skill sets and become more practised in discernment: we have no need of false islands; we don’t need cumbersome, deep-draft vessels that run us onto unseen reefs.

We cannot possibly foresee all of the circumstances to which we’ll have to respond, nor will we be able to control them. Our lives are our unknown oceans, awaiting discovery. Life requires of us the courage to venture and to the resilient, dynamic fluidity of discernment. Making the most of life is a step-by-step engagement with all of life, day by day, year by year, as life’s journey proceeds… and with no turning back.

Discernment grows deep within us, beneath the layerings of our experience, tastes, desires, intelligence, spirit, capacities, interests… wisdom’s foundations lie in the ongoing synthesis that we test day by day through living.

It’s helpful to recognise that there are one or two problems with data. We usually have no choice but to assume, for example, that one “fact” is as good as another provided it’s “true”. A fact can be true in one circumstance but not another, or at one time but not at another. One fact may have been collected by a bulldozer, another using a scalpel. Facts are the fruit of questions and a stupid question can generate as many facts as a good question… they just won’t be of much use. And we can never be sure we’ve got enough facts: one missing fact can overturn a lot of apple carts.

Then there’s the sheer potential volume of facts. We know that a 1:1 road map is useless. A useful road map leaves an enormous amount of detail out, and a scale of 1:10,000 can be quite handy. When we deal with facts, we can very easily end up with a mountain range of facts mined from a molehill of reality.

We inhabit a data-junky world. Technology-based memory capacities are soaring with the storage densities of hard drives… but their life expectancy is falling: from millennia (in the case of engravings on stone and text on vellum and papyrus) and centuries (in the case of print on paper) to decades. And, as new memory platforms and operating systems are developed, older systems become less readily accessible. We could find our decision-making systems mired in vast quantities of ephemeral information and ourselves living in a new age of naïveté. Facts are okay only if you have enough of the right ones and a system for dealing with them.

But they are certainly better than blind belief… obstinately-held blind belief is pretty much bound to be flawed. “Belief that” —accepting the actual-factual truth of an unproven statement — is what you do if you’re too lazy to acquire wisdom and too unfocused to assemble the facts. In that “here’s something I can absolutely count on” sort of a way, “belief” is a cop-out. It takes an “assumption”, freezes it as solid as a comfort zone, and resists every attempt to think about a “best before” date. It stalls the story that is yours to drive. And, in time, like dead fish, it turns toxic.

“Belief that” sets us against and apart from mystery. When a “belief that” reveals its inevitable flaw, it will drop us in the middle of bother we’ll have no means of understanding. It denies our capacities and responsibilities to think and, most importantly, to let the challenge of mystery stand.

“Belief in”, on the other hand, can mean “trust in” — and trust can lead us onwards. But it doesn’t mean we don’t need to pay attention. Trusting and learning from the mystery of life together reveal the path of wisdom.

Wisdom winnows data away to a few empowering principles that let us steer our way through the information, emotions and coercions that constantly rush at us without a lot of aggravating doubt, fear or anxiety. It feels intuitive. It’s an expression of who we are because it arises from what we have become.

And, when we become fully ourselves, I think we’ll recognise the answers to all of the questions we’ve been longing to ask along the way, and stand securely on the horizon’s edge.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FglNdqHRUY&feature=related