I took a sailing lesson once and got more than I bargained for. It’s something that I have used as a guiding
principle for my life.
{Uh, Clement, sailing? FOCUS! Saturday 6…landscaping, gardening, TOOLS and equipment!!! Make it happen!}
Yes, sailing. We’ll get back on land in a minute.
A group of us rented a sailboat for a 1-hour sail. Before hitting the very low-seas, the rental company provided a lesson of sorts. It was more to determine how soon they’d have to come get us in the tender than to teach us how to navigate.
Sure enough, one of the crew who grew up near the water piped up, lying about her knowledge of how to sail on it as if it was a resume credential for defending her tony address. I knew that I couldn’t sail the boat by myself (and that she was lying,) which I think was useful after Ahab helped flipped us and I (former lifeguard) had to swim for her as she panicked trapped under the sail.
{So Nemo, I’ve been swimming before. Please, you will come to a point in my lifetime I hope!}
Yes, the point is the instructor LOVED sailing. I loved sailing too, but didn’t know how. So I listened to him in part because I was interested but also because I felt like surviving the trip—and watching the other person wind herself up in her lies was exquisite. Anyway, he gave us the 1-2-3’s of catching the wind on a “beam-reach” and making sure everybody knew when the captain was to “come about” (change directions) to avoid being brained by the boom as it swung from port to starboard or vice versa.
Thing is, he ran out of instructions (lots of ‘I knows’ on this crew) before we got him back to shore so he kind of just started talking—about sailing.
Propped on the bow of this Dutchman style day-sailor, he asked if we really knew how a sail worked. Most thought that it caught the wind and it pushed us forward.
WRONG!
And, as it turns out I was the only other one who actually knew this…
[Terrific, Professor Intrepid. Should I leave and water my grass now or just wade off into the water?!]
…a sailboat pulls you along. The sail interrupts the wind and creates a low pressure in front of it, which the air tries to re-balance (nature abhors a vacuum) and this creates forward motion or “lift.” Optimize this with reefing the sail, changing the boat’s orientation to the wind, let out another sail, etc.—that’s the game.
What else works this way, he asked: An airplane wing!
{Seriously, there’s more? I may not be able to obey all lighted signs and placards much longer.}
Negative pressure/faster moving air above the wing than below pulls the plane off the ground. It’s called, he said with a smile that was so ear-to-ear it was practically wrapped around his head (in a good way,) Bernoulli’s Principle.
His passion has stayed with me until this day and when I meet people equally as passionate about what they do, I listen, ask questions, and try to drink it in—you don’t meet them every day. His unassailable love for what he did was contagious. In other words, it’s not so much that he knows what Bernoulli’s Principle is that got me—its that he loves what Bernoulli’s Principle does. And it makes him happy.
{Seriously…toothpicks and tumbleweeds…Oh wait, is that your point on the horizon?}
This same passion holds true for Saturday6. We got lost driving to an event last year at Farmer Lee Jones farm—talk about passion—so we had more time to talk than planned. It was awesome: Community gardens, glacial erratic boulders, dirt, weeds, tools, and plants that did and didn’t make it.
This group of “yard-en” aficionados I am lucky to be part of embodies that sailor’s passion for wind and water. The sailboat guy gave a requiem to one total stranger he most likely would never see again because being on a boat made him happy. He would have given it to 1 million in a TED talk with the same love of the game.
And so it goes with the Saturday 6. It is the love of the game that fuels their passion. Thanks for letting me sail along.
The Saturday 6 passionate yard-eners are:
