SGIS–Making Better Sailors

[Below is the text of my part of our first 2018 newsletter. It should hit SGIS mailboxes soon; however, one never knows about the mail delivery in our area–it is slow like geologic processes are slow.]

In my most recent chapel talks at each campus, I spoke about the moment that Simon Peter first met Christ on the shores of the Sea of Galilee in the fifth chapter of the Book of Luke. During a single morning, Peter changed the direction of his life, choosing to stop being a fisherman in order to follow Jesus and become a “fisher of men.” Peter’s story was apt for explaining a phrase that I have found myself using recently: “more sailing than driving.” I have made a habit over the last couple of years of describing any situation that will require finesse and an ability to adjust on the fly as “more sailing than driving.”

For some reason, almost certainly misguided, I have assumed everyone knows what I mean. In short, Simon Peter made a life decision like a sailor does. He was not following a specific roadmap. He was faced with something he could never have expected that offered a life of greater meaning. So, just as a sailor does when facing a new opportunity, he changed course.

As a girl, my mother grew up sailing each weekend on Fishing Bay around a point from the far larger Chesapeake Bay of Virginia and Maryland. Years later when she tried to pass along her love for sailing to my sister and me, it was clear early on I would not be much of a sailor.

At age six or seven, my contribution was to complain about being bored and do my best to avoid being hit in the head by the boom swinging across when we tacked. I liked going fast, but we rarely seemed to go fast.

In the moments when the wind faded to a breeze, then diminished to stillness, I wondered why we’d chosen floating in a hot boat rather than some other more entertaining hobby such as capturing bugs on the grassy edge of the narrow bay shoreline or fishing for sharp toothed Blues.

During those dead air moments, as we sat waiting for any breeze that might help us move again, I realized that sailors never go straight toward their destination. They take advantage of what the wind gives them—moving closer to but not directly at their destination with each tack.

Good sailors know how to make the most of the situation, and importantly they know how to take advantage of an unexpected opportunity—a breeze stiffening off the port bow or the promise of an advantageous wind around the point.

With decades (and decades) separating me from my time at Fishing Bay, I have come to see sailing metaphorically, rather than simply as a pastime I never quite understood well enough to see why some people thought it was fun.

Years after my time on Fishing Bay, I watched the America’s Cup with fascination, and it revealed another reason to learn to sail—at least metaphorically. The sailors on those boats knew exactly how to work together toward a greater goal. The defining characteristic of the best boats was the ability of a crew to be stronger because of each other, rather than trying to find success despite each other or trying to be better than each other. St. George’s graduates learn to be part of such crews and they learn how to be skippers of such boats.

I believe that all too often we pretend there is an accurate roadmap for what lies ahead of us in our lives—a sequence of turns along a well-delineated route guaranteed to take us where we need to go. A lot of schools appear to teach their students as if this is true. I believe this is dangerously misleading, and it sells our young people short.

The best-laid plans fall away when we are faced with the unexpected. In such moments, we want our kids to be equipped to navigate a new opportunity or challenge. So, what should we want St. George’s Independent School students to learn?

To sail. Our students should become good sailors—entrepreneurial ones, ones who are brave enough to make a necessary shift in order to work toward a better world, a more fulfilling life—ones who, like Peter, know how to become part of a group greater than the sum of its parts.

As is so often the case I find that our students find far better, certainly more succinct, ways of making the essential point. Inside this newsletter you will find a Q & A with Sope Adeleye, Head Prefect of the Class of 2016 and currently a sophomore at Harvard.

When she was a senior at St. George’s, she told me: “ [At St. George’s] I have learned not what to think but how to think, and not just how to think but how to think with other people.”

Sounds like someone who knows how to sail.

Best wishes to all St. George’s sailors in 2018! Happy New Year!

[At the end of this week, my wife, daughter and I will head to Richmond, Virginia to help celebrate my mother’s eightieth birthday. In the piece above I mention my mother as a sailor who spent much of her youth on the water pulling everything from the wind it would give her.

To my thinking now looking back over so many years, she was a sailor the way a good musician is a musician–at some point such people forget the science, and they move on by feel.

On the water she learned to trust herself, as well as work with others; she learned to be brave enough to ride on the full strength of a powerful tail wind, as well as patient enough to sit out still air.

My mother has needed all that learning in her life, and she has deployed it in a way that has showed me to aspire to as much myself. Her intelligence, grace, kindness, humility, passion, work ethic, and even her “don’t tread on me” approach to multiple cancer battles together serve as an excellent buoy for which any of us might rightly sail. ]