I’m ten years old, sitting in a little sunfish sailing dinghy in the bight of water behind Figure Eight Island, and the wind has died down to nothing. The sail sags. The water is a polished mirror. The shoreline is an agonizing distance away.

The only way to get a becalmed sunfish to move in these conditions is to work the rudder back and forth, back and forth, fanning the sea like a fish flapping its tail. Even this barely moves you. And yet … the shore slowly gets closer.

So much of sailing is learning that you aren’t in control, but that you also aren’t powerless. I’ve been in hurricanes on my little sloop Xerxes, winds up to 120mph. I’ve been in a norther off Cape Hatteras, certain I was about to die. I’ve been becalmed in the middle of the South Pacific without enough diesel to push through to the next pocket of air. In every case, it felt like nothing I did or could do would ever matter. In every single case, the things that I did mattered tremendously.

When I was a teenager, all I wanted in life was to be madly in love with my dream partner. I had no idea what that dream partner might look like, but that didn’t shake my conviction. I was meant for love. I filled notebooks with poetry. I fell in love almost immediately with pretty much everyone. Lying in bed at night, I would daydream about some mystical creature moving into a house down the street, and we would find each other and become best friends and go on countless adventures and spend the rest of our lives together. (These daydreams would later become the heart and soul of my novel THE HURRICANE).

Sailing and love have been constant features of my life. I’ve spent deep time on dozens of different boats over the years, and I’ve given my heart to quite a few people. There’s much in common with sailing and love: the calms and the tempests, the ebbs and flows. Both are the subject of so much poetry. And many a boat is named after the holder of someone’s heart. There’s a wistfulness in going to sea and also in joining lives with another. Hope is there as we shove off from shore, unable to see what lies beyond the horizon. Hope, and of course a little dread.

When my wife and I met one another, we weren’t interested in dating. We had both gotten out of engagements five months prior and were enjoying our friends, our alone time, our peaceful lives. Coming out of a bad relationship is like surviving a storm. The stillness on the other side is manna for the soul. Like a becalmed sailor, you just want to lower your canvas and jump overboard and swim around a bit, remind yourself that you have this exquisite body that’s all yours, meant for moving and doing.

Shay and I were swimming happily around our becalmed boats when we somehow drifted within sight of one another. Two romantics with zero desire for romance. But of course, the sea has her own designs.

Our first adventure together was meant to remain friendly. Two adventurers getting on a boat in the Arctic to go look for polar bears. The morning we were set to embark, we shared our first kiss. Two days later, on a boat in the middle of a sea of ice, I told Shay that all the heartbreaks in my past would not stop me from throwing my full heart into this. I would rather get crushed again than not give this my all. If all those past relationships deserved my complete efforts, then so did this one. For me, the ultimate tragedy would be to hold back an ounce of my love the one time it was fully deserved and reciprocated.

A hopeful romantic herself, Shay completely understood. And agreed. And reciprocated. We shoved off from shore with hearts full of hope and hands held tight to the tiller.

Three weeks ago, I was at dinner with a mix of close friends and strangers. At some point, the conversation strayed into the minefield of politics and current events. The person to my left commented on how difficult it’s been to remain positive lately. It was easy to compile a list of the many reasons anyone had to be dour. With two young kids at home, she worried not just about their future, but how to inspire in the present. How to instill in them the hope that she remembered feeling at their age. The hope that only recently had begun to dim.

It’s a conversation I’ve had with myself many times, and one Shay and I have been having a lot recently. We are both happy, cheerful people. We tend to see the good in others. We also see the long arc of history bending toward the positive. But it’s hard to deny the backwards steps that occur along the way. As I type this, injustices are fanning out at a blistering pace. Hardworking people are being rounded up by the descendants of those who stole this land. Wars of conquest and aggression are taking the lives of hundreds of thousands. Bombs rain down on children because of the hubris and greed of men. Northers off Cape Hatteras. Hurricanes of violence and fear.

To be happy in a world that contains suffering is an affront to many. It demonstrates naiveté at the very best and sociopathy at the very worst. You must not care about anything if you dare to be happy. Hope is a cancer. Misery the only true mark of an enlightened soul. It’s a tempting trap to fall into. Empathy, worldliness, and compassion beckoning us toward submerged reefs like sirens. Progressive politics are full of those who spend all energy being miserable in the hope that this will bring someone they never meet, whose life they never touch, some measure of joy.

Many of my close friends have lashed themselves to the mast as they wrestle with the allure of this misery. What else can they do? And it’s this powerlessness that points toward the root cause of it all. The feeling that what little we do has no positive effect, and therefore we must resign ourselves to a life of grief and sadness. Because positivity is a slap in the face to those who suffer. Which is a common viewpoint among those who have never truly suffered.

I remember very clearly where my thoughts went off Cape Hatteras, certain that I wouldn’t survive until morning. I thought of my mother and my sister, warm in their beds. I thought of a woman I loved, and I wished nothing but for her to love someone else as deeply as I loved her. In a category five hurricane in the Bahamas years later, I had similar thoughts about people who weren’t in danger. The last thing I would’ve wanted is someone suffering there with me.

Fast forward a decade or so, and I’m working in a university bookshop in North Carolina. A group of students at the university decide to spend their spring break working in a soup kitchen in the Bronx, and they need a faculty member to chaperone. That’s how I find myself driving a van full of rural Southern kids across the Mason-Dixon line into one of the more dangerous parts of the greater Manhattan area.

For context about this neighborhood, there was one evening where we were walking back from the soup kitchen, and a police cruiser pulled up beside us and asked what in the hell we were doing in that part of town after dark. We told them we were staying in the convent up ahead, that it was a bunch of college kids working at the soup kitchen. The cops frowned and slowly cruised beside us until we got home. One of the local kids volunteering with us that week regaled us with all the times he’d been mugged and how he had given up on ever owning an iPod that didn’t get stolen. The street signs along Decatur had bandanas tied around them, red or blue to signify who owned what corner. It was a more dangerous time than now by every statistic. All I remember seeing — the only two vignettes that stand out to me — were a group of kids kicking a soccer ball in the middle of the street, and two teenagers on a stoop kissing.

Children at play. Two kids falling in love. How fucking dare they?

Of course they dare. They don’t know anything else, and nor should they. Imagine disbanding those children, shooing them up to their rooms to be miserable. Or breaking up those teens and warning them about love. Imagine calling up a friend and listing all the reasons they should be unhappy. Or even worse — doing this to ourselves.

I have friends who do real hard work toward making the world a better place. Friends in politics, charity, conservation, education, the justice system. Friends working to bring back extinct species, planting hardy corals, friends fighting to get good people elected, to bring justice where they can. I got to know the people behind POTS (Part of the Solution) over a few trips to the Bronx. One thing these folks all seem to have in common is a positive attitude. Hope. Even though they see the worst of it out there. Maybe that hope comes from having one hand on the tiller. Or maybe they have the strength to reach for the tiller because their hearts are full of hope.

Either way, it strikes me that misery comes more from inaction than it does attention. You aren’t unhappy because you are aware of the true state of things — you are unhappy because you feel like your best efforts aren’t enough to turn the tide. You are sitting in your little boat, far from shore, not a puff in your sails, and for all the yanking back and forth on that little rudder, it feels like what little current there is might be dragging you backwards.

I get it. But I also think you are wrong. You’re not only wrong to think your efforts don’t matter — you are wrong to think your misery is serving anyone. There’s nothing worse than a hopeless romantic. What’s the point of romance if we aren’t going to believe that this time deserves as much love and grace as any that came before?

For several weeks of my life, I served food to the homeless. This isn’t a brag — it’s the opposite. I did the bare minimum. I continue to do the bare minimum. I vote my conscience, I speak out with what little voice I’ve been given, I donate, I sign petitions, it all amounts to very little. More harm is done by one evil man in an evening of missiles than I’ll ever undo in my lifetime. Has it ever been any other way? Did we really go to sea and think we would slice through the storms?

There has been evil on this planet for as long as there have been nerve endings. Human suffering goes right back to the beginning. Murder, pillage, rape — that’s our legacy. So is play and love. If you want to be miserable, because some part of you thinks that this is all you can control, that this will be a balm to the downtrodden, then that is certainly a choice. But know that this is all it is: a choice. Thinking your black cloud is going to somehow brighten another’s day.

Without any evidence that it’ll amount to anything, I’ve remained a hopeful romantic. I don’t delude myself into thinking that a few meals changed the world, or my donations, or any petition I’ve signed, or any vote in all the non-swing-states I’ve ever lived in. What I do think has changed the world — at least whatever small corner of it that I’m in — has been the positivity and love that radiates out of my every pore. A love that’s been compounded in recent years by finding my twin flame. Is that a delusion? It’s possible. Perhaps the miserable and the overjoyed are both accomplishing very little. But who is having the better time of it?

A short version of the above was my advice to my neighbor at dinner a few weeks ago. Yes, the cabin has lost pressure. She can scream into the void, or she can put her oxygen mask on and then see to the kids. Show them that play is still an option and that love isn’t pointless. Learn from them how to retain joy in world that’s always known suffering.

Hands on the tiller, even when there’s no wind.

The post The Hopeful Romantics appeared first on Hugh Howey.