HOLLY DAYS

In reading my older posts, I saw that my first weird Facebook post on a Holly Day principle was made 10 years ago, and that we began developing Holly Days 25 years ago. A lot has changed. I am a tired old man and my kids are nearing the age I was when we started this. I also noticed I had used a photograph of the cover of Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of our Nature twice as the featured image of a Hope post. His second book with a similar theme: Enlightenment Now was my warm companion, as you can see by its condition, through much of this pandemic, and bucked up my flagging hope.

But by the same token, as the pandemic has worn on, as climate-change-driven weather has worsened, and efforts to thwart it have stalled, as trumpism has continued to undermine democratic norms, and bitter schisms between splinters of both progressive and conservative tribes spin off increasingly extreme factions who seem ever more disconnected from reality, my persistent hope feel more unrealistic by the day.

As is my custom, an anecdote: In a fit of reckless homesickness for my beloved Pacific, I impulsively bought a large old sailboat I could not really afford within weeks of moving east. The Hudson Estuary, for all its charms, has nowhere near the spiritual power for me as the San Francisco Bay or a Channel Island kelp forest, so I have struggled and doubted the cost and effort of owning a half-century-old sailboat in this venue. Last fall, something inside the rudder broke, disconnecting the tiller from the rudder blade, making the boat not only useless, but mostly worthless.

As soon as I got the boat out of the water, I dropped the rudder and brought it home to sit on a pair of sawhorses in my little studio apartment. It sat there as a curse for weeks serving as nothing but a reminder of my irresponsible folly, and I could hardly bear the thought of the huge amount of work, nasty fiberglass shards, not to mention cost that I knew would be involved in repairing whatever was wrong with it. It tortured me all winter, as I felt more hopeless than I ever had about my lifelong obsession with being a yachtsman, thinking more about how to get out from under the burden of the boat than how to fix it.

As the snow began to melt, I worked up the courage to haul it outside and cut it open to find out what had gone wrong. Stainless bolts that held two rusty mild steel webs to the bronze rudder post sheared, and a previous and shoddy repair or two had left the fiberglass blade cracked and deteriorated and the foam core soaked with water. My discouragement only deepened, I might be able to find a used rudder for $4000 I didn’t have, but even then none that I found we compatible with the early version of the boat I had. I spent weeks of sleepless nights and churning stomach fretting and hopeless about the 10,000 lb white elephant that felt to crushing me. Eventually I bashed at it some more, extracted the bronze shaft, and finally made a plan I thought might work and be affordable.

That was the bottom of the trough of despair, tho certainly not the end of it, as once I had a plan in hand I could at least take concrete action in response to my fretting. There were dozens of decisions and dilemmas to solve, but rung by rung as I tackling them, I began to climb out of the pit of despair I had fallen into. By the time I was fairing the blade, facing the most dreaded part of the job: grinding fiberglass into clouds of painfully itching dust which I solved by building a cyclonic filter for my vacuum and using disposable Tyvek suits and respirators, I passed over the neutral point and began to feel elated instead as I saw the aggregate of my difficult decisions and tasks amass into a beautiful rudder many times stronger and more durable than the one that had come on the boat.

As we reinstalled it to the admiration of my fellow yachtsman at the boat club where I keep it, I was stunned by the emotional rollercoaster ride such an existentially meaningless issue had taken me on. From the tortured nights spent sleeplessly haunted by the broken hulk at the foot of my bed to the giddy joy when I first held the tiller which steered confidently without a hint of freeplay, I was humbled by how my own inner affect, be it hope or despair, had felt so out of my control, when it clearly was not.

While we may be sometimes be able to reframe our perspective, we are usually surprisingly at the mercy of our own emotions. Most often, the way back to hope from that pit of despair is just to step onto a rung and start to climb, rung by rung until we emerge back into the light. This fall, I took a step toward the light of our collective fate, and began volunteering as a chef at Soup Angels, a lovely and especially generous soup kitchen in the same little village of Nyack where the boat is currently sleeping.

Happy Hope