I don’t usually want to go to sea, not when it comes to the point. I shape the year round it, clear the time, book the passage or — if it’s on our own boat — plan the trip with apparent keenness. I know from experience that it is a Good Thing to be doing. But a few days beforehand, tired and mired in desk-work and appointments, I realise I dread it.
The weather looks nasty. I’m scared of the sea, as all sensible people are. I know that this so-called holiday will involve a lot of trouble and physical discomfort, sleep deprivation, possible danger and marital squabbling. At such moments it feels at best like a waste of precious holiday time, and at worst some sort of suicide pact. When I joined Paul for the return leg of the Azores race two years ago, I remade our wills, so that the children’s livelihoods would be unscathed by what I saw as impending annihilation.
The night before a passage, nightmares tangle with mad wish-fulfilling dreams. Before we attempted the difficult entrance to the Menai Strait in unsettled weather with small children aboard, I had a vivid dream that I could tuck the boat safely into my handbag and go by bus. At Tall Ships races I can’t join in the last shoreside festivities, but retire early to a cramped bunk, to toss and writhe and try to make up excuses why I have to go home. But I hold fast, just: remembering that on the one occasion when I really couldn’t go because I was taken ill in Brest, I watched the fleet sail away to La Coruña with real grief, as if my chance of happiness was dipping away.
For I know really that once the umbilical cord of land is broken, everything changes. There is no point in fear: you do what has to be done, whether as half of a crew of two or as a small cog in the majestic progress of a great square-rigger. You stand your watches, steer, keep lookout, tend the sails and meet the needs of your companions for food and comfort and collaboration and consideration.
In reward, there comes a moment when everything clicks. With my eyes on the wobbling numbers of the compass and my body braced to the slope of the wind, without conscious volition I will begin to sing softly to the ship. As the tune rises, I know I am happy. And now that I am old enough to think about these things, I understand that the happiness is tied up with the apprehension, the cowardice, the discomfort and damp clothes. I know that I would not be nearly so happy lolling on a cruise ship even if the view was the same, even if the ship was as beautiful as this barque or brigantine or little plastic ketch. The need, the control, the pride of usefulness and the sense of uncertainty and fleetingness are part of the happiness. The ship lurches along, the black line meeting the numbers momentarily and falling away: 180 degrees, 185, 180 — good — 175, then suddenly below 170 as a big wave hits — haul her back up to 180. Not everyone needs to find this out at sea. Those who tempt the mountains or the deserts or the freezing wilderness of Dartmoor also know it; but then, so do others who never adventure physically but pore over books or blueprints or religious meditation. Some get it from artistic achievement, some from performance; observe the exultant happiness of the chorus as a big musical comes to its curtain call. Mothers get it from the gruelling ordeal of childbirth and the marvel of the baby. Matthew Parris seems to find it from balancing on icefields. War correspondents and soldiers get it in conditions most of us would abhor. One of the happiest men I ever knew was a farmworker who got it from his chickens, from the perfection of his work with the hoe, from a rough lunch eaten in a ditch and the occasional straightening of his old back to catch a winter sunset. Another carved models of fairground rides in immaculate detail, and smiled with strained eyes when they revolved, perfect in miniature, at the end of many months.
But wherever it comes from, every life needs those moments of pure and perilous balance: a neat, sweet coming together of control and risk and effort and exultation. That is the peak of happiness. The lower slopes and green valleys lie around it, with their harvest of mild daily contentments: company, mutuality, family, freedom from envy and rancour and self-contempt. We need ordinary things too. But the valleys are weary and sour if there is no mountaintop.
There is no happiness in a flat calm stagnant life, without steepness and turbulence. George Herbert wrote that God dispensed riches to man but withheld the gift of rest: “Let him be rich and weary, that at least if goodness lead him not, yet weariness may toss him to my breast.”
But that is not the whole truth. Rest is overrated: the weariness of effort is itself a route to happiness. An easy conquest is without flavour. Happiness contains hope and therefore also fear: the song hums through my head in the night watch as the wind rises and the forecast says Force 8, occasionally 9.
It takes a while to learn this fact about happiness: that it is not a goal or a plateau, but a work perpetually in progress. Not for nothing does the US Constitution guarantee the “pursuit of happiness”, not the finding of it. Happiness is only partly the daily bread, the decent home, the benign family and neighbourhood. These things are to be treasured, but as any depressive knows you can have them all and yet see nothing but blackness. Human beings are programmed to look outward and beyond, straining for something more beautiful and just beyond reach: Platonic archetypes, God, Truth, whatever. Happiness lies in hauling these things closer with every sinew straining. At times the happiness does come unbidden, a gift at a street corner or under an unveiling moon; but because there is an inner Puritan in the most hedonistic of us, it helps if there has been effort. You need not even necessarily be striving for some conventionally good end: reading Piers Morgan’s riveting account of his decade as a tabloid editor, the sweat of happiness seeps out authentic and bracing from accounts of frenzied nights spent scooping and shafting the opposition; it does not seem to matter that many of the stories were in fact footlingly unimportant.
A biochemist can explain it all with endorphins, a believer with God. Whatever this happiness is, its nature is to peak and waver and break over us like a wave caught in the ship’s glow, and sweep away again into the dark. But its moments of high illumination cast a soft reminiscent glow on the plains of ordinary life. The effort and the fear of failure are an integral part of the zap, the boom, the shine, the light that never was on land or sea.
To return to the sea, the paradox is perfectly expressed by the late American yachtsman E.B.White, writing at 78 about his inability to quit sailing: “There will be the old uneasiness, the old uncertainty . . . with the tiller in my hand, I’ll feel again the wind imparting life to a boat, will smell again the old menace, the one that imparts life to me: the cruel beauty of the salt world, the barnacle’s tiny knives, the sharp spine of the urchin, the stinger of the sun jelly, the claw of the crab . . .”
Endeavour, hope, fear, wonder: happiness.
