“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of a hell, and a hell of a heaven” John Milton.

A lot of people were mystified why, having survived but not enjoyed one ocean crossing, I would want to do another.  There are many reasons why I am rowing the Pacific - first and foremost being the environmental message - but another key reason was precisely because I had such a tough time on the Atlantic.  The main challenge for me was staying positive when the going was tough - all too often I spiraled into negativity.  I scrabbled through, but I felt it was only right at the end that I really started to get the hang of this psychological aspect.

I learned that life is very much a matter of perception - it’s not so much what happens to you as how you choose to interpret your experiences.  We’re all constantly in the process of defining ourselves according to the way we choose to perceive ‘reality’.  This is especially true when spending three months alone on a small boat in the middle of an ocean, without much in the way of outside influence to balance the voices within.

I felt like I’d learned a lot about how not to row an ocean by getting it all wrong the first time - by allowing the negative voices more htan their fair share of headspace.  and the best way to test whether I’d really learned the lessons was to put myself in the same situation but with a different mindset - with a determination to stay positive, to be kind to myself, to keep my confidence and self-belief strong, and to take it one day at a time.

And now that I am entering the last few hundred miles of my journey, I am starting to feel that I may pass the test.  This voyage, although testing at times, has been a small personal triumph for me in terms of my ability to stay on an emotional keel, so to speak.  There has been less of the whinging and whining that characterized my Atlantic video diary, and I have largely avoided the rollercoaster of emotions I went through on that crossing.

But as we all know, it ain’t over yet.  If I miss Hawaii there will be some major whinging!

Roz

http://www.missionperformance.com/Consultants.html#RozSavage

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 1:59 am and is filed under Mission Chatter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.