We have now been here 32 days and we are waiting for the next port - Progreso, Mexico.
My life right now is only to be here on T/S Gunilla and it is a special life. It's really all about eating, sleeping, working, studying and maybe showering. And discussing dumb things that are so small in reality, but become enormous and interesting here. There is no time by yourself, but you get used to it. You breathe Gunilla, and I like it. Even if I sometimes get very tired of it, I can honestly say that I sometimes love it.
On this journey I have been reading “I don't want to die, I just don't want to live” by Ann Heberlein. A heavy book about suicide which has given me new and interesting thoughts about life. Heberlein is discussing a theory about how we use our time in life. Historically humans have lived a life called 80/20 which means that 80% of our time was filled with work, responsibilities and needs. Basically just surviving. And 20% was spare time when we had time to think and doing what we wanted. Nowadays we live the opposite, 20/80. 20% responsibilities and 80% freedom. Heberlein thinks that the new amount of spare time has made the human smarter but also unhappier than before. Mental illness may have increased when people got the time of thinking of life in a bigger meaning.
In my normal life I live like a normal person, but here on board I live more like the people in the old days. I am a doer here and work with the body, instead of a thinker who works with the brain. I do not say that my life at home is bad. Because it is really not. But when I think of my life on board Gunilla and what that includes (work, tiredness, school) a thought comes to my mind. And it sounds weird, even for myself, but the life on board of Gunilla is easier and maybe happier than it is back at home. So maybe the theory is true. Or maybe not. I don't know and I do not have the time or energy to figure that out. It is a work for somebody else.
Tomorrow I arrive to Progreso for six days at port. Six days are no days in my normal life. But it is like the biggest of things here in my Gunilla life.
So long,
Love, port-side watch
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