Vacation or an adventure?

Someone asked me recently what exactly this voyage is. Is it an adventure? A vacation? How do I see it?

Before boarding in Lübeck, I thought of it as an adventure. The sort of thing I told people, and even strangers about with anticipation and excitement. Now that I am on board, life has settled into its own rhythm.  There are things I do each day: set mealtimes, familiar walks on deck, familiar sounds around me, such as the constant drone of the generator outside my cabin portholes. In some ways, it feels less like an adventure and more like a retreat. Not the spa kind with massages and scented candles, but the kind where you wake up early, follow a schedule you did not design, and spend much of the day in quiet observation.

On land, when I go on a retreat, there is always a timetable. You wake at the same time each morning, eat when the bell rings, turn up in the meditation hall punctually, whether you feel like it or not. There is a shared rhythm, and it begins to shape you. Life on board is much the same. Meals happen exactly on time. The crew’s shifts divide the day into neat four-hour blocks.

My own work, which is writing, making podcasts, and drawing, fits into the spaces between. When I walk the deck, I pass the same equipment, the same coil of rope, the same spot where the sea spray catches the light just so. The activities here are nothing like a meditation retreat, yet the structure is familiar.

That red thread of attention runs through everything. Out on deck I wear my hard hat, partly for safety and partly because the thought that something might hit me on the head has a way of bringing me into the present moment. Moving between decks, I take the stairs slowly. I have a history of falling, so “one step at a time” is not a metaphor here. It is practical risk management. Even my small backpack, carried everywhere so both hands are free, has become a kind of mindfulness bell. It reminds me that I am not here to rush.

The retreat feeling comes, too, from the way you handle space. When I leave the bridge, I take all my things with me and leave the desk exactly as I found it. This is part of the ship’s culture: keep your footprint small, make room for others. At first, I thought of this as politeness. Now I see it as a practice, a way of paying attention to the people who share this floating home.

There is also the discipline of looking, really looking. At a retreat, it might be the texture of a stone in your hand or the flow of your breath. Here it is the way the sky changes from steel grey to pale gold in minutes, or the way the sea seems flat until you notice the slow rise and fall of the horizon. Sometimes I watch the crew at work, each with their own gait and their own way of moving, and it feels like watching a dance I do not yet know the steps to.

So no, it is not a vacation. And it is not an adventure in the swashbuckling sense, with sails snapping and champagne corks flying. It is a voyage with the pace and discipline of a retreat, where each day is strung together by a red thread of attention. That thread runs through every step, every small act, every moment of stillness, and in its quiet way, it is as demanding and as rewarding as any adventure I have ever taken.