In Irons

What is liberty? We say of a boat skimming the water with light foot, “How free she runs”, when we mean, how perfectly she is adjusted to the force of the wind, how perfectly she obeys the great breath out of the heavens that fills her sails. Throw her head into the wind and see how she will halt and stagger, how every sheet will shiver and her whole frame be shaken, how instantly she is “in irons”, in the expressive phrase of the sea. She is free only when you have let her fall off again and have recovered once more her nice adjustment to the forces she must obey and cannot defy.

In sailing, as in life, momentum is a valued commodity, the secondary source of power that keeps us going long after the original source has disappeared. In sports, we tend to favor those athletes who are on a winning streak. “The momentum is with them”, we like to say – by which we mean that they appear to have transcended their own inherent abilities and are surging ahead on the accumulated power of the past. But we tend to forget that the reverse is also true. If winners tend to keep on winning, then losers tend to keep on losing, for the physical principle governing inertia is a two-edged sword. It states that a body in motion tends to stay in motion – and a body at rest tends to stay at rest.
“Each tack is a transition, “ the captain had said to me during one of my earlier sailing lessons, as if he knew I would find myself “ in irons” one fine day. “Each time you come a about, “ he added, “there’s a frightening moment as you pass through the eye of the wind”. (…) To change directions is a difficult tactic at best, and we’re doomed to failure, destined to become a prisoner of the wind, if we attempt it in an ineffectual way.

There’s only one sure way to come about, and that is to gather momentum on the course we’re on. As a youth, I applied that lesson narrowly to the handling of my sloop, but with the passage of time I saw that it was a verity, as true for life on land as for life at sea. I might abhor the tack I was on – and I recall two memorable occasions when I did. Early in life, I deplored the college I was attending; later I despised the job I held. But I had to stay with each long enough to gather wherewithal (decent grades in the first case, sufficient savings in the second) to carry myself through the eye of the wind. If I quit one or the other prematurely, I would founder and the wind would take over my life, blowing me in directions I had no desire to go.

What’s at stake is nothing less than personal autonomy – our capacity to empower ourselves so that we may choose the course of our life rather than have it chosen for us by others whose values may differ radically from our own?