My Christmas

As I mentioned to my readers earlier, Cassie and I, our sister and brother-in-law, and our son Neil chartered a 40' sailing catamaran to sail the waters close to Fraser Island National Park.

It wasn't all we planned; it rained most of the time, but it was an amazing experience because as soon as we left the wharf we were summarily disassociated from every outside influence except the sea. We entered a new world; a world of vastness, and of smallness. Vast sea, small me.

I realised that the life we lead in what we call everyday life is SO unnatural - not in the sense of not being in a natural environment - but in the sense that we do things all do just to make other things happen. An email, a web browse, a telephone conversation. Almost nothing we do except eat and sleep is done without immediate effect.

On our fourth day a severe wind warning came through the coast guard radio along with a Merry Christmas message. I has never sailed anything this big, and everyone else had never sailed. Nevertheless, we headed for the big blue, and as the waves picked up and began wearing funny white caps, and the wind begain singing in the rigging, we decided it was time to 'come about'.

I was the only one who had ever turned any sailboat around so I was, by default, the skipper. I was seriously on edge as I barked orders like Captain Ahab at all of my relatives, who waited terrified for the massive sail to lunge across the deck, the ropes to twang tight and the boat to pick up speed. Water began smashing through the trampoline between the hulls, and the spray became a horizontal slash as it hit the ever increasing wind.

It all went OK, but it was only after we had anchored alongside a deserted, endless island beach, paddled ashore and walked, still swaying, barefoot along the sand that we realised the immediacy, the 'NOW' power of the experience we'd just had. The sea didn't care what we did. The wind didn't care what we did - or how well we did it, but we cared; and I realised that those few moments of fear filled action, of absolute focus, had cleansed me of months of office accumulated mental dross.

Everyone on board felt it; some loved it, some were scared, some wanted to get off. But for each of us it was strong, it was real and it was as powerful as the sea we chose to wrest some miles from, spoke in its uncomplivcated, unequivocal and massive way. What we did, unlike the land-world, had immediate and appreciable effect. If we did it incorrectly we saw the immediate result. If we did it well, we felt the effect as 'Velella' surged forward.

Life is good; even for only five days. The day we arrived back home we heard that a cyclone was headed for Fraser Island and that 2500 campers had been evacuated. Life is also good when you are lucky, and we were lucky.

On Christmas day we had booked lunch at the Kingfisher Resort on the island. We moored the big Cat, joined the throng of day trippers on the path up to the resort, and arrived to find a huge buffet lunch of seafood, sandcrabs, prawns, turkey.. the list went on and on.

We don't often get to venues like this because of what we can't eat (we're both GI) and we found ourselves surrounded by holidaymakers who, it seems, had chosen the venue for the amount of food they could get down.

It is very difficult for me to watch people killing themselves slowly with food. As we've discussed before, calorie restriction is the best of all anti-ageing strategies; it's a scientific no-brainer; eat less, live longer. So to watch people gorging on all the food and drink they could get in was a real wake-up call telling me that we still have an enormous task ahead of us in educating the ordinary 'Joe' about how to live with food consciousness, as an Alkalarian.