Living on a Boat for Two Years Shaped My Life

I have concerns about our culture and its need for comfort above all else. Entitlement is running rampant. How are we building character?

Adventures - my home in 1994-1996

When I was a sophomore in high school, my parents ran into financial trouble, and we had to sell our house and move on to a 48-foot sailboat named Adventures they half-owned. The original idea was to sail the world, or some such craziness, but really it was the only fall-back plan they had. Sounds exotic. It wasn't. We were out on a mooring and had a nasty El Niño that year. I can remember the rain soaking me to my socks while picking up family members at the dock via our dingy. You could say we were early adopters though, since we were the only ones I knew with pagers. To get home, you had to drop a quarter in the 15th street pay phone (yes, back when those were still a thing), send a code of "15", and hope whoever you paged wasn't taking a nap.

There were 5 of us on board. My brother was off to college, my sister and I were two years apart and my little brother (11 years younger) was there along with my parents. We didn't have much money and sometimes used the oven to heat the boat. I got used to reading and doing homework by oil lamp. I'll never forget the cold showers. By a sick twist of fate, I also broke my left arm in half that year (I still have two plates and 11 screws in there). We had no TV and very little entertainment. Prior to 1995, I hated reading. I ended up reading 13 books that summer. I started with Tom Clancy novels and Stephen King's Dark Tower series. I found a love for reading which has served me to this day. I've now graduated to audio books at 3x speed which sits very well with my recently discovered audio-visual learner tendencies (thanks, mild dislexia). :)

I learned how to make due with what I have. I learned some of the true values of life. One Christmas on that boat, having no money, we all wrote each other letters detailing how much we love, respect, and appreciate one another. To this day, that was one of the best Christmases I've ever had.

Real life, the love you have for family and friends, doesn't change whether you are with or without money. What does change (if you let it) is your character and your sense of entitlement.

That's a lesson I could only learn having been with money and without it. True character can't be bought or borrowed. It has to be earned via the experiences of life. Don't complain about your circumstances. Instead, look for opportunities to implement perseverance. Take note of the character you're building and ask yourself if it could be built any other way.

You can only know what you're made of when you're truly in the fire. Don't jump out too quickly. Comfort isn't always worth the price you'll pay in the long run to miss out on the character you need.