You’re on a boat. You didn’t build it, and you don't have the option of stepping off; you're just ... on it. It carries you whether you like it or not, and whatever direction you face is more or less a "forward" direction.
Bear with me here as you imagine the following: the hull of ths boat is your body--vessel, frame, the whole maintenance project. The wind is thought, impulse, breath. The waves are time. The destination—if you can call it that—is disappearance. Every boat sinks in the end, but, for now, yours floats.
You occupy and steer the boat the way you might spend an early morning—half startled, but with some degree of stewardship. You bail out what leaks in, tighten lines as things creak, and in the quiet pauses between repairs, you make tea.
The Galley
The galley is your kitchen, or rather your ship made small again—four square feet of countertop masquerading as a command center. At dawn the light falls through steam from the kettle, soft as a pulse from a thin wrist. The familiar hiss of water waking up.
Making tea before sunrise seems like superstition more than necessity, but it’s also the moment when you notice the machine of yourself still working. The knees crack (or at least mine do), the lungs expand, the heart—an old engine from another time—keeps its rhythm. You slide into observation mode: the deck is secure, for now.
The pot is stainless steel, the handle slightly loose. You fill it with water and you light it. When the first faint whistle rises, you catch your reflection in some glass, blurred by the curvature of the boat, recognizable. sort of, but somehow unfinished and not really you. The effect is slightly comic, if your mind is open to comedy, like spotting your ghost a few seconds before the obituary runs.
The Leaf and the Heat
Tea is merely leaves and water, and yet the combination never behaves quite the same twice. The leaf surrenders only under certain conditions. It wants patience, soft attention, no sudden shocks. So does the body. You add just-boiled and cooled water to the stone-ground leaves and watch them bloom back into memory of green—first resistance, then release.
The aromas seem to say something almost theological. The world, when heated properly, answers back.
Maintenance
Owners of wooden boats talk endlessly about maintenance—the sanding, sealing, and touching-up that never ends—and every conversation about the body eventually turns the same way. Diet, exercise, posture, sleep. Repair, patch, refasten. There’s pride in good upkeep but also delusion, the quiet faith that attention can postpone dissolution.
You follow all the rules: rest, hikes, greens, less sugar, more time in real light, touching grass. Still, entropy wins decimals daily. The boat ages even when dry-docked. But, while it holds, there’s satisfaction in minding bolts that no one else will ever see.
The trick, perhaps, isn’t preservation. It’s observation—learning to notice the leaks without panic, tightening a screw for the sake of elegance rather than survival.
The Weather
What sailors call weather is what you call circumstance: mood, illness, economy, politics, fortune. It arrives uninvited, moves as it pleases, and makes your own plans seem juvenile. You keep a jacket within reach and call that forethought.
Glass storms come as loneliness. Cold fronts appear as sharp words. You tell yourself to ride it out. Sometimes you succeed. Other times, the sea turns you sentimental. In those moments, the cup of tea performs a fragile miracle—heat against the cold logic of impermanence.
You drink slowly, not to make it last longer but to pay closer attention as it fades.
The Pirates
Distraction is your system’s true enemy, not corrosion or time. Pirates of the modern age don’t climb ropes with rifles; they tap notifications. They seize your awareness mid-pour and convince you that your ship is productivity itself. You reach for the phone, check a screen, and forget the point of the ritual entirely.
Whenever that happens—and it does daily—you start again. Pour water. Watch. Wait. Reclaim the single act from the global noise that wants to own it.
Making tea becomes a reclamation project: attention salvaged from the wreckage of multitasking.
The Animal Below Deck
Some part of you remains primitive, responsive only to appetite. It wants sugar, sensation, certainty, sometimes booze or weed gummies. It paces the inner hold like a caged creature. For years you mistook it for flaw when, really, it’s ballast. It keeps the more spiritual parts from floating off.
On bad days, it howls for distraction; on good ones, it sleeps under the hum of the kettle. You’ve stopped trying to banish it. Instead you feed it warmth, one sip at a time. The wild thing in your chest quiets best when reminded it’s still part of something alive, and it's impossibe to separate this aliveness from the sea and air around you.
Oversteeping
You’ve made tea bitter more times than you care to admit. The metaphor writes itself: ambition, control, fear—a few seconds too long in the heat. Oversteeping is your specialty. You stretch tasks past balance, push against rest, overstimulate.
Then comes exhaustion, the metallic aftertaste of effort mistaken for purpose.
So you try restraint. Heat the water, add the leaves, step back. Watch rather than intervene. The leaves will open without your encouragement. They know what to do. The trick is remembering that everything, from muscle to thought, obeys the same physics: immersion, release, transience.
Lightning
Sometimes, without warning, clarity strikes. The kettle whistles louder than it should; the room floods with a slant of light; the smell of steam heating the galley becomes the whole world. You realize—flooded with simplicity—that the ritual is not escaping death but participating in it.
The tea only exists because something else ends: leaf undone into water, heat dissipating into air, time spent into expiration. The body does the same work at scale. Energy passing through form.
The insight lasts a few seconds. Then you’re back to pouring, hands steady, mind quieted by the memory of silence.
The Crew
People board, share space for a time, and depart. Family, lovers, friends. Every relationship is a temporary alliance of vessels in the same current. Together you trade warmth, gossip, stories, medicine, and leave bits of each other on the deck.
Some vanish suddenly. Others drift until absence becomes atmosphere. The older you get, the more ghosts eat breakfast with you. They appear as scents, colors, fabrics, flashbacks in the steam.
You pour tea for them sometimes — a second cup, placed beside your own, cooling at the same rhythmic speed. No-one’s there to drink it, but the symmetry pleases you.
The Hull
The doctor calls it condition; you call it maintenance log. Bloodwork steady, pressure manageable, liver content. You file it away like reports from an old shipyard. Everything still running, though the hull knocks louder in certain swells and certain temperatures.
Night brings awareness of proximity—the fragile divide between inside and outside, between breath and that long quiet waiting under it. The sea below, you remind yourself, isn’t villainous. It’s home for everything that sinks.
Maybe peace is just reconciling with where you’re going.
The Heart Attack
You picture it sometimes without drama: the kettle half-filled, the breath caught midstep, a spike, a slackening. A small failure of the unseen machinery. You crumble to the deck—or kitchen floor, same thing—and join the statistic you’ve read about but never fully believed. Steam still rising.
Someone will find you, or they won’t. Either way, the water cools, the cup grows still. The ship ceases motion without the captain ever filing a report.
You wonder occasionally if it will feel like surprise or recognition. Odds are both.
After the Pour
Afterward—if afterward means anything—the tea stays on the counter for a while. Light fades across it. Heat becomes air. What you once called “you” disperses naturally into elements. In that sense, the sinking isn’t tragedy; it’s thermodynamics.
The Buddhists say that consciousness doesn’t travel; it reconfigures. Like vapor, it leaves no residue but an invisible echo lingering just long enough to notice.
That’s as close to belief as you can manage.
Morning Again
And still, each day you wake, slightly surprised. The kettle where you left it, the body more or less functional, the boat afloat. You move toward the same small sequence—the measured pour, the rising steam, the slow sip, the silence after.
Stewardship continues because meaning hides inside repetition. You realize that persistence itself is a ceremony, and making tea each morning isn’t denial of the boat’s fate. It’s proof that you understood it.
Everything sinks. Everything steeps.
You drink before the tea cools, and the moment the cup empties, you begin to make another.