I was seven the first time I saw my father afraid.
We were a long way out in the Pacific on the Anna Louise, a wooden fishing boat from the 1930s. A storm had been building for hours, with swells as tall as a house. Then the main fuel tanks ran dry and the engines died. A boat with no power can’t point its bow into the waves, and a boat that turns broadside in seas like that rolls. There was fuel in the deck tanks, but it had to be moved below by hand, out in the weather, with the deck throwing us around like a toy. My father went out to do it. I went with him.
I remember the work less than I remember his hands. They were shaking. He was a commercial fisherman who had spent his life on that ocean, and I had never seen him scared of it. In the dark, with the engines dead and his young son beside him on the deck, he was.
We got the fuel across. The engines caught. The bow came back around into the wave, and the old boat did what she had always done and held.
The question, and the word I’m using
I have told that story for years as a story about courage. This time I want to ask what it built and what it cost. The question I keep coming back to, in my fifties, is this: what helped me build a life, and what am I still learning to let that life give back?
I’ll use one word for the answer, and I want to define it before I use it. By integration I mean the growing ability to bring my body, my feelings, my values and my actions into relationship with one another, so that an old survival response becomes a choice and not the only way I know to live. I don’t say healed. Healed suggests a state I was restored to, and I can’t find the earlier undamaged version to restore. Integrated says I am still putting one person together out of everything that happened, good and bad.
The essay moves through eight places in my life: the storm, the people who loved me first, the body, the books and practices, the work, my sons, the crew, and the present. Each section has one true scene, what I think it means, and where it stops working. I have left out the places where I can’t tell the difference between a pattern I recognize and a cause I can prove. When I am guessing, I’ll say so.
Strength, and what it cost
They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble.
I learned two things on that deck. The first is the one I’ve been telling. When everything fails, you can still move. My hands worked. The fear didn’t freeze me. I could help. That knowledge has carried me through a great many bad days, and I wouldn’t give it back.
The second took me much longer to see. In the wordless way a child understands things, I took in that no one was coming. The adults were as scared as I was. The only thing between us and the water was what we did next. I didn’t file that as a fact about one night. It got installed as a way of being. If something goes wrong, I handle it. I don’t ask. I don’t wait. I certainly don’t expect to be carried.
There is a rule at sea that I’ve carried everywhere. In a storm you point your bow into the waves. You don’t turn broadside, and you don’t run, because the sea is faster. The boat climbs the face of each swell, hangs at the top, and slides down the back, and then the next one is already coming. I have used that rule on the end of two marriages and on years of money trouble. It is a good rule.
Here is where it stops. It is not a rule against help. A boat in a storm has a crew, and a port, and people who built her well. It isn’t a license to take every wave, either. Some pain needs treatment and not endurance, and some storms you shouldn’t be out in at all. And I should say what a seven-year-old was doing on that deck. Nobody asked whether a boy that age should be doing it. I tell the story with some pride, because it is mine. I don’t want the pride to cover that plain fact.
Competence got me through. It also made dependence feel like a defect. Those are the same fact, and everything else in this essay is a version of it.
The compass
A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.
If all I’d had was the boat, I would have written a different essay, and probably lived a worse life. Before the boat, and during it, there were my father’s parents.
Before my grandfather retired they lived in Walnut Creek, and my brother and I would visit. In the evenings they had a drink, bourbon for them, and they made us Shirley Temples with goldfish crackers, and we all sat and watched the news. After dinner they retired to a lounge off the bedroom and ate ice cream sundaes. One year my grandfather set up a giant train set in the garage and the two of us helped him build it. In the days we played golf.
Nothing in me was braced the entire time I was there. I felt loved.
I have thought a lot about what that did. From about four to six I was in the desert with no contact at all with anyone from my earlier life. All I had was the memory of those two people and a feeling of warmth and safety I couldn’t have named. It ran in me for two years with nothing to renew it. Research on childhood adversity suggests one stable, caring adult can buffer a lot of the damage. That is a finding about averages and not a promise about any child. I recognize my grandmother in it. She lived to ninety-nine and a half, a fact she would have corrected if you rounded up.
I had other people like that, and I only fully see them now. A fisherman, my father’s best friend, who taught me to tell time and read me The Hobbit in a cloud of pipe smoke, and who twice came out at night to collect me when my father had been arrested for drunk driving. Teachers who each saw me. The families of my friends, whose lives I picked out when I was nine because I wanted what they had. The self-reliance I’m describing grew inside a life that also contained help. It was never a solo journey. It only looks like one from the road.
There is a limit to this story, and I want to keep it in. The woman who loved me best also defended her place as the family’s matriarch quite aggressively, and the women who joined the family felt it. She was steady throughout our lives, even if it came with strings. And a compass points. It doesn’t carry you. For my last year of high school I lived in my grandparents’ house, and it was one of the best years of my life: freedom, welcome, and no more walking on eggshells. A year is a year, and then I left. My grandfather, who had always wanted to go to college and was too poor, was sick with cancer by the time I graduated from one. He held on to be there. He died about a year later.
The body
At Cal I got up at five and drove a fifteen-passenger navy blue Ford van full of rowers to the boathouse. Nearly all of them were short of sleep. A few were still drunk from the night before. I was the one who didn’t drink, which is why I had the keys. We came in quietly to a hundred-year-old boathouse that smelled of the generations before us, checked the lineup, took the oars down, took our seats and shoved off the dock.
Even the warm-up was a race. You never wanted to be down on another boat. Never.
I rowed on the starboard side, often in the bow, because the outside hand was the right hand and my right side was the stronger one. That meant the more technical half of the stroke, the squaring and feathering of the blade, fell to my left hand. I put the power where the power was and gave the delicate work to the damaged side. It was arithmetic and not courage. I never announced my left side to anyone, and nobody cared. It never failed me in a race. Once a movement becomes automatic, my left side works. It is the thinking about it that brings the spasms on. I have spent decades noticing what that implies: the body works best when I stop watching it.
The stroke came when I was ten. One morning, at the start of the first year of school that had ever felt safe, I couldn’t get out of bed. Doctors found a stroke in a deep part of the brain, and it left my left side weak and prone to spasm. I’ve written before as though I knew why. I don’t. Research links chronic stress to cardiovascular harm, but childhood strokes often have no clear cause, and nobody has studied the specific chain I once drew with such confidence. What I can say is that I was a frightened, watchful child, that I had a stroke, and that I can’t prove the first led to the second.
What exercise did for me I can say with more confidence, because I was there. It was my first coping skill and it may have been the most useful one. It gave me a way to process feelings I had no other place to put. Years later I sat for the first time in silence with a room of strangers and realized that the years I had spent on a bike were doing the same thing, and that the crew on the water was the same as the people on the cushions, sitting in silence together. Nobody had told me. I had been practicing since I was ten and calling it exercise.
Now the limit. A reliable body is not the same as a safe heart, and for a long time I confused them. What limited me in the boat was never the arm. By my own account it was nineteen years of being trained to be completely self-reliant. Rowing isn’t only effort. You need grace and feel, and you can’t have those while you brace against the people next to you. And here is the better evidence. I trusted crews with an expensive boat at five in the morning, in the dark, for decades, and it taught me nothing about trusting a partner with my distress. Those are different muscles. I had built one and starved the other.
The maps
Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding.
When I was twelve a monk asked me about my life. I had gone to a Vedanta retreat in West Marin to help clear the roads after a storm, and afterward we sat at the kitchen table of the old farmhouse with tea and English breakfast cookies. He was in saffron robes with white hair and no accent. He could have been any of the fishermen I’d known, except for his face, which was calm. There were no speeches. A man and a boy sat at a table, and he listened. I felt seen, and I was twelve, and I had no word for it.
He never taught me a thing about Hinduism. What I took from him was how it feels to be near someone who isn’t in a hurry to fix you. Forty-four years later I still drive out there to sit in the quiet.
The books came next. In high school I took a class on dreams and myths, where we read the Greek myths and Joseph Campbell and were shown David Lynch. I read Grimm’s fairy tales at seventeen and recognized the dark, ordinary forest in them. I found George Leonard’s The Ultimate Athlete and, for the first time, a set of traditions that joined the body to wisdom and made intellectual sense to me. In my twenties I read Dan Millman, Michael Murphy and Jon Kabat-Zinn, and after my first divorce I started going to Spirit Rock on Monday nights. When I finally sat for thirty minutes in silence with a room of strangers, I found out how loud my head was. I had no idea I was that noisy.
These maps changed what I actually did. They sent me to the cushion and the long rides, and they gave me words for things I’d felt on the ocean and in the desert before I had any vocabulary.
But I owe you where they failed. My mother spoke the language of theosophy my whole life, and I experienced the opposite of everything she professed. Words that weren’t embodied always lit up my bullshit detector. That meant any map I couldn’t walk, I didn’t trust, and it kept me out of a lot of rooms. After a few years the talks at Spirit Rock lacked the depth I wanted, and I kept going anyway for the silence. The calm that monk showed me turned into a standard. I aspire to it, and on a bad day I fall well short, and a calm I perform is one more performance. Reading about equanimity is not the same as having it. The site I write on is called Still Not Enlightened for a reason.
What I trust now is what I can check against my own body, and the freedom to take what rings true and leave the rest.
Capable outside, conflicted inside
I have ridden up a road in Marin about a thousand times. A house sits just off it, and I know who lives there. Every time I pass I feel a small motor start up underneath the effort.
He was a client at a gym. I trained him around a number of health conditions, and some years later he invited me and my sons to live on the bottom floor of his house, since he traveled and didn’t mind company. He taught my older son to shake hands firmly. He took us in as his own. Then he offered to help finance a prescription-exercise platform I had been trying to build for years, to make what I did for individual clients available to many more people. We got a real product running, with a large library of animated exercises, and it was ahead of its time.
Then I did something I almost never do. I handed it to someone else. I hired a project manager and gave up direct control of the build, and from then on I knew what I was told. The answer for two years was that the database was still being constructed. There was always another reason it wasn’t ready. When I finally pulled the plug and confronted him, I came to believe the money had not gone into the product. I won’t say more than that.
I want to be careful about what I learned from this, because I’ve learned the wrong things before. The easy lesson is to trust no one. That is the lesson the boy on the deck would take. But I didn’t trust my own judgment then, and there was a certain relief in putting something that large in someone else’s hands. Someone close to me raised the problem more than once, in a voice I felt I had to defend against. She was right, and the delivery made it unhearable. I had spent my life never asking for help, and when I finally did, I didn’t delegate. I abdicated. Never ask, and then trust catastrophically the one time you do. That is the same wound pointed in two directions.
I still owe him. The motor is that I want to make him whole, and to show that his faith in me wasn’t wrong, only slow. If I am too late, the money will go into a fund for people with a dream and no one to finance it. Paying it forward may have to do if paying it back doesn’t.
The picture the rest of the world gets is of a calm, capable man. People tell me they feel calm around me. Inside, there is often a lot of conflict, and for a long time I couldn’t take in the same safety I made for others. I was the first person in my family to graduate from a university. My father did not come. I told myself it was fine, and mostly it was. A child who has done everything asked of him and then some, and finds the one parent left not turning up to see it, may conclude that even that wasn’t enough. I have to be careful, because I’m guessing at what I concluded at twenty-two.
The money has been its own storm. At twenty-five I turned down a job with a future at twelve dollars an hour because I was making sixty an hour training people, and I needed to survive more than I needed to plan. I funded my later projects myself, because I was used to self-reliance and was not very skilled at asking for help. It would be neat to say the housing instability of my childhood explains it. It might. It is also a pattern I recognize and not a cause I can prove. Plenty of people with stable childhoods have money trouble, and the platform had causes outside me, including better-funded competitors. I can’t separate my wiring from the market, and I think honesty means leaving that gap open.
My sons
I made a vow as a young man. I had seen violent anger land on a child, and I decided I would never hurt anyone that way. I have kept it, as far as I know. I also stand corrected. As a father, my boys would occasionally push me to the point where I erupted in a loud Goddamn it, and I probably startled myself more than I startled them. A father who tells you he broke the cycle cleanly is selling something.
My older son, Cameron, was a quiet teenager, and I drove him to school every day for years. I would try to make conversation and more often than not he wouldn’t talk. So one morning I said, All right, Cameron. You’re terrible at talking. Let’s just drive in silence. And then on some days, when he was ready, he would bust out with more information than I knew what to do with, and I wouldn’t know whether he was my kid or somebody else’s. I learned to be quiet and wait. That is not a technique. It is the opposite of the house I grew up in, where a boy who couldn’t say the right thing at the right time was punished for the silence.
I also got things wrong. When Cameron was in middle school I took him mountain biking, and at Wilder Ranch he fell far behind me on the ride back along the highway, tired. At twenty-four he told me he’d thought I had ditched him and wasn’t sure he would make it back. I had known where he was the whole time, and I never once thought to tell him. He had carried that for years. All I could do was listen. I had a plan for him, too: that he would do all the things I wasn’t able to do. I made him row for four years. He says he’s glad I did, and I take it at face value, but the plan was mine, and I won’t pretend it wasn’t.
What I do now is ask him more questions than I give advice. He’s thinking about asking for a bigger share at the barbershop where he works, and possibly moving to another shop. It is a risky move, and I know exactly how risky, because the same thing blew up on me years ago. I don’t say that to him. I ask what he thinks will happen. The best parenting advice I’ve had came from a man who survived the Holocaust: don’t deprive your kids of deprivation. It is harder than it sounds.
Cameron taught me something simple. When he started getting tattoos, he asked when I was going to get one. I said I didn’t know what to get. He said, get something that represents something you love. I said, my boys, dogs and bikes. It was the truest sentence I’d said in a year, and my son was the one who asked the question.
My younger son, Caden, has taught me more than anyone, and the lessons are not what I expected. He is twenty-two. I am his full-time caregiver, and our days run on routine and music. Our best times are doctors’ visits. He knows the routine and never wants to sit next to me, so I tell him I don’t want to sit next to him either, it’s embarrassing, and we both laugh and the waiting room chuckles. He is the only person I know who enjoys the dentist and says thank you to everyone when he’s finished. Who makes a party out of the dentist? What he can do, and I can’t, is take a kindness. He lets people help him and he says thanks, and the thanks is complete.
Caring for him is not only a gift. Some days it is a relief when he’s settled outside with his music and I can work, and I won’t pretend otherwise. What he shows me is that a person can need a great deal and be fully himself, with nothing in him ashamed of it.
The crew
And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.
I have been rowing in one form or another for forty years. One Saturday this summer I rowed with two lightweights headed to Penn in the fall. The kid in front asked how long I’d been at it, and I surprised myself by saying forty years. Two seats behind me was a sixty-three-year-old woman I’d trained a decade earlier.
Saturdays start at four-thirty. College and high school rowers and masters row together, enough for five boats of eights. My younger son comes along and rides in the launch with our coach and the coach’s son. Afterward we all have breakfast at a coffee cart in an office courtyard by the boathouse, college kids sitting with the old men, and my son is a fixture everyone knows. He and the coach often sing out there in the dark. He cheers the crews on.
It isn’t whether you are young or old, male or female. It is more about doing no harm and pulling your weight. I am just happy to be included. In rowing we don’t ultimately train for our own interest, but so we don’t let our teammates down.
I love that sentence, and I distrust it. It describes a belonging with a price on it. I stay because I can pull. The harder question is whether I’d be welcome if I couldn’t, if I turned up needing something.
One answer is a floor. The year after my divorce I went east for the Head of the Charles with the Marin team, and a teammate let me sleep on a corner of his cement floor. I’ve never forgotten being offered it, and I remember being surprised to be. It is the clearest evidence I have that a crew will make room for the person and not just the strokes.
The other answer is the dogs. I have two now, Buddha and Pancake. Before them there was Tucker, who lived to sixteen and a half, fourteen and a half of those with me, and slept at the foot of my bed every night. He held me at my most broken. I’m not sure whether I’m rescuing the dogs or they’re rescuing me. On Sundays I drive to Aptos with my younger son and the dogs for a long walk on the beach. Buddha’s back legs aren’t what they were, Pancake is short and stout and not built for distance, and my son generally refuses to exercise at home. On the beach, everyone gets nine miles in, and my son loves being the leader.
Now the limit, and it is a hard one. Crew, dogs and a beach are all places where I belong without having to say anything. That is part of why I love them. When my second marriage was ending, I drank too much at a lunch that was meant to be a quick one, and a friend from the boat drove me to the airport because I was in no state to drive. It was the first time anyone had seen me drunk. I was hurting in ways I didn’t yet understand. I wish one of us had asked what was going on, and I didn’t say. We had rowed together for years and trusted each other with a boat, and neither of us spoke. Being useful enough to stay is not the same as belonging when you need something. Belonging in that sense has to be asked for, out loud, and that is the one skill the boat never taught me.
The harbor
Then are they glad because they be quiet; so he bringeth them unto their desired haven.
I haven’t got a single morning to hand you, a day when it all clicked. What I have is a week, and I’ll describe what the pieces do to each other.
On Saturday I’m up at four-thirty. By the time the sun is up and the boat is moving I am quieter inside than I have been all week, because my body has done what it knows how to do. Afterward, at the coffee cart, nobody needs me to be impressive. It is the closest thing I have to the kitchen table with the monk, except that this one repeats.
On Sunday I drive south with my son and the dogs. When my son digs in, I notice an old pull in my chest to fix it, to raise my voice, to get it done. I suspect, and it is only a suspicion, that I handle it better when I have rowed and slept and eaten. I can’t order patience. I can only prepare the conditions for it.
Then my phone buzzes and it’s my older son, texting about a new tattoo or a shop he’s thinking of leaving. I feel the twinge of wanting to warn him. I ask a question. There is an old move of mine that I did not know I made, which is to stay in the room while something goes out of me. A woman I loved told me afterward that I disappeared exactly when she needed me closer. She was right. What I’m practicing is catching it sooner, and when I do, the sentence I’m trying to say out loud is: I’m pulling back, and it isn’t about you. Mostly I catch it afterward. Sometimes I catch it in the middle.
That is what I mean when I say integration is a practice and not a place. The body steadies me, the feeling gets named, the old response is noticed and sometimes declined, and there is a person there to say it to. When it works, one thing helps the next. When it doesn’t, I go back to the boat.
I am not finished. I am still learning to tell someone when I’m afraid, and to ask for what I want before I need it. I’d rather leave those open than make a neat ending out of them.
What asking this led me to build
This inquiry has a practical offshoot, and I should be careful describing it, because a personal story can motivate a project and it can’t validate one.
I run two platforms. One is for rowers and clubs. The other, called SportsFlow, is a set of tools for noticing the connection between how a person feels, how they move and sleep, and how they perform. The questions in this essay are the ones that led me to build them. The founding rule is that the machine serves the person and the person is never the raw material. The working principle is the boat’s, said another way: the state can’t be ordered, but the conditions can be prepared.
Here is what I think is reasonably established and what isn’t. Regular exercise is associated with better mood and lower anxiety across a large body of research, though the effects are modest and vary by person and by study. In laboratory studies, putting a feeling into words tends to reduce its grip, but most of those studies are small. Wearables track sleep and heart rate trends reasonably well and are a much weaker window into emotion. Everything beyond that is proposal. The assessment instruments I’ve built, and any score that combines them with wearable data, are hypotheses until independent samples test them. I can’t tell you they work because they helped me.
The questions I would like it to help people investigate are these. Does a person who records how they feel before training for a few months see a pattern they couldn’t see before? Does seeing it change what they do? When the number from the wearable and the person’s own report disagree, which one is telling the truth, and when? Those are questions, and I’d rather ask them honestly than sell the answers.
I was a boy who could take the wave head-on. At fifty-six I’m learning that the harder crossing is into the harbor, where there is nothing to fight and I have to let myself be held. I think that is what the rest of it was for. Not to make me a better storm sailor. To bring a person who is very good at weather to a place where he can be quiet and not have to earn it.
If you are out in your own weather, point into it and keep your hands working. And when someone offers you a floor to sleep on, take it.