The Cruise That Never Ends: Embracing Continuous Growth

There's this thing happening when you're trying to write about time and life and all that heavy stuff. You sit down, fingers poised over the keys, ready to dispense wisdom like some kind of wannabe Orpheus ready to lyricize existence itself, and then—nothing. The cursor blinks, mocking your pretensions. You realize you're just another schmuck on a boat, to borrow from Robert Louis Stevenson.

"Old and young, we are all on our last cruise," Stevenson wrote. Here we are, ostensibly moving forward, but always with one eye on the rearview mirror, as if the past is a tailgating semi-truck driven by all our regrets and missed opportunities about to rear-end us. And maybe it will. Maybe this is what guilt is—the past deciding to play demolition derby with our present.

It's a metaphor, obviously. Life isn't actually a cruise, thank God, because if it were, we'd all be trapped in an endless buffet line, plate in hand, wondering if the slightly gray-looking shrimp is a gastrointestinal Russian roulette or an avant-garde attempt at a new delicacy. No, life is more like... well, it's like life, isn't it? Unique and unclassifiable, just like every other unique and unclassifiable thing.

But let's look closer and get a little weird (as if talking about life-as-cruise wasn't weird enough): we're all on this trip together, yet somehow we're all in different time zones. Some of us are living in the past, our guilt an overpacked suitcase we're forever lugging around. Others are perpetually in the future, worrying about what's around the next bend, as if knowing would somehow transform us into expert navigators of our own existence.

And then there's the present. Ah, the present. The elusive state where peace supposedly resides, a temporal Zen garden, always just out of reach. But have you ever tried to stay in the present? You're a statue on a moving walkway—standing still, but still moving forward.

So what's the solution? How do we navigate this last cruise of ours without spending the whole time green-faced over the rails, seasick with philosophical nausea? Well, I don't have the answer. If I did, I'd probably be selling it on late-night infomercials instead of writing this. But I do have a thought, and it's this: the trick isn't to move away from the past or towards the future, but to move towards the next thing, whatever it may be.

It's a subtle shift, but an important one. Instead of running from what's behind us or chasing what's ahead, we simply take the next step. And then the next. And the next after that. It's the same direction we were going anyway, but the energy hits different. It's less about escape or conquest and more about... well, living.

But here's where it gets tricky: this "next thing" we're moving towards? It requires mastery. And mastery requires practice. Lots and lots of practice. The kind of practice transforming your forehead into a wall-banging instrument, if only for some variety.

And there it is. The more you practice something, the more it becomes a routine. The more routine it becomes, the more it morphs into a boredom-generating machine. And boredom? It's mastery's kryptonite.

So how do we maintain our enthusiasm in the face of repetition? How do we find the fundamentals interesting when we've done them a thousand times before? I wish I could tell you. I wish I had some magic formula to make the thousandth free throw as exciting as the first. But I don't. What I do have is a quote, courtesy of one Alice Wellington Rollins: "The test of a student is not how much he knows, but how much he wants to know."

Is this the key? Maybe mastery isn't about knowing everything, but about wanting to know more. It's approaching each practice session, each repetition, each mundane task as both a wide-eyed novice and a battle-hardened expert. It's becoming an intellectual archaeologist excavating the ruins of your own understanding, mining new questions from old answers, and unearthing new challenges in familiar territory.

But how do we do that? How do we maintain childlike wonder in a world seemingly determined to grind it out of us? Maybe the trick is to look for overlap. To find ways to combine the things we enjoy, to create connections where none existed before. To be the Venn diagram we wish to see in the world.

For instance, let's say you want to exercise more and you like spending time with your spouse. What kind of exercise could you do together? Rock climbing? Salsa dancing? Extreme origami? (Is this a thing? If not, it should be.) Or maybe you want to hang out with friends and advance your career. Could you start a business together? Form a professional support group? Create a fight club for middle managers?

The point is, life doesn't have to be compartmentalized. It doesn't have to be a series of isolated tasks and obligations. It can be an interconnected network of experiences, each one informing and enriching the others. It can be a cruise where every activity, every conversation, every moment is an opportunity for growth and joy and mastery.

Mastery is not about reaching some final, perfect state. It's a really good song. The kind making your skull feel like a too-small container for your brain and turning your heart into a chest-bursting alien.

Now, you wouldn't listen to that song just to get to the end, would you? This would be missing the point entirely. No, you listen to savor every note, every lyric, every subtle shift in rhythm. And here's the real magic: every time you listen, you notice something new. Maybe it's a barely audible guitar lick in the background, or the way the vocalist's voice cracks ever so slightly on a particular word. Suddenly, this song you thought you knew by heart reveals a whole new dimension.

This is what mastery is. It's not a race to some imaginary finish line. It's immersing yourself so deeply in something the boundaries between you blur. It's a constant treasure hunt for new things to appreciate, new challenges to overcome, new nuances to explore. It's being both Theseus and the ship, constantly rebuilding yourself through the act of learning.

And just like how you might listen to the same song a hundred, a thousand times, each experience unique, each revealing something new – this is how we approach mastery. We don't perfect a skill and then move on. We dive deeper. We find new layers. We discover what we thought was the bottom was actually just another step on an endless staircase descending into fascination.

Let's stop trying to freeze time or capture some perfect moment. Let's be willing to press play again, to listen with fresh ears, to dance to a rhythm we thought we knew, only to find it's changed – or more likely, to find we have changed.

Or maybe we'll just end up with really strong thumbs from hitting the replay button. Either way, it's got to be better than sitting in silence, waiting for life to happen, right?

So here we are, you and me, schmucks on a boat, sailing towards... who knows? But we're moving. We're improving. We're mastering the art of never quite being masters, of always finding a new note to love in the song of existence. Isn't this what this whole cruise is all about?

Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I hear my song playing. And who knows? This time, I might just dance.