"Wayne.B" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 29 Oct 2011 15:13:32 -0400, "Wilbur Hubbard"
wrote:

Skippy has been absent for several weeks, now. One of the last times
he
posted was when he said his dad was quite ill and probably didn't have
but a couple of weeks left. Sad news indeed, especially for somebody
like Skippy who seems to be overly dependent upon family
relationships.

While it is not necessarily a bad thing to be over-involved in family
matters and relationships with all the commitments and burdens those
entail, it is mostly anathema for a sailor to succumb to such lubberly
conventions. No sir! Sailors must be an independent lot. There is just
no way one can merge lubberly family and friends affairs with the
pursuit of cruising. The sailing end of the bargain will be the end
that
suffers or becomes dormant altogether.

I've seen it over and over again and it's quite a monument to failed
dreams that weddings, funerals, graduations, birthday celebrations and
the like yank sailors off the seven seas over and over until one
finally
hears they've given up sailing altogether because of its impact their
shore side obligations.

Friends, you've got to put your collective feet down. You've got to
just
say NO to lubberly, family and friends rituals. Why? Because any and
all
of them interfere with the cruising life. It's a case of you can't
have
your cake and eat it too.

Are you a sailor or are you a lubber?


Wilbur Hubbard

====

It's too bad that your own family relationships are so poor or
non-existent. In the end the sea could care less about you, family
might.




What this family relationship business all boils down to is a lack of
any kind of a sense of individual personal worth. It's a crutch more
than anything else.

Back in the day family meant something. Tribes meant something. Now that
there are billions of people, family and tribes don't mean squat. ****,
more than half the children these days are born out of wedlock.

What one must do is get one's priorities straight. Are you gonna sail
and be independent or are you gonna commiserate with family? You can't
really cruise as a lifestyle and do the family relationship business,
too, as the one is just not compatible with the other. If family
relationships are more important to a body then to go off cruising is to
be untrue to oneself. It's a form of multi-tasking where both endeavors
suffer . Seems to me all this family relationship business is highly
overrated. Seems to me that folks who attempt both at the same time are
doing neither right.

Wilbur Hubbard