I want to describe Sven’s restlessness from the outside, because the inside account, which Sven himself has written elsewhere, is the account of the person experiencing it, and the outside account is the account of the person who watched it across twenty-five years and who has a specific kind of perspective that the inside account cannot have: the perspective of someone who saw the full arc rather than each individual movement within it.
From the outside, the restlessness was never anxious. That is the first and most important thing to say about it, because restlessness in the popular imagination tends toward anxiety: the person who cannot settle because something is wrong, who is always moving because staying is uncomfortable, who is chasing something that recedes as they approach it.
Sven’s restlessness was not this. It was the restlessness of someone who is always moving because the movement is the point, because the next thing is genuinely interesting rather than a distraction from something uncomfortable, because the capacity to engage with the world at the level that Sven engages with it requires continuous movement to find the contexts that match the capacity.
Always What’s Next
The specific quality of Sven’s restlessness that was most visible from the outside was the continuous forward orientation: always the question of what comes next, always the next qualification to pursue or the next passage to plan or the next project to build, always the horizon rather than the position.
In a person with less competence or less genuine engagement with what the forward orientation was oriented toward, this quality would produce the trail of incomplete projects and abandoned commitments that the restless-and-unfocused person leaves.
In Sven it produced the opposite: each next thing built on the previous, the qualifications accumulating into the capability that the voyage requires, the passages accumulating into the offshore experience that twenty-five years of them has produced.
I used to say to him, across the years, that I did not know where he was going but that I was confident he was going somewhere. This was not a small observation. The person who is always moving toward what’s next can be moving in a direction or can be moving without one, and the difference is only visible from a sufficient distance and over a sufficient duration.
Twenty-five years is sufficient. The direction was always there. Each individual movement, seen on its own, looked like restlessness. The full arc, seen across twenty-five years, looked like preparation for the most specific and ambitious expression of everything the individual movements had been building toward.
The Moment I Understood Naora Was Different
I have been hearing Sven describe plans for years. The sailing school plan, the yacht delivery business, the OCC involvement, the various passages and projects and ideas that the twenty-five years of restlessness produced. I know how he sounds when he is describing the next thing and I know how he sounds when he is describing something that is not the next thing but the destination that the next things were always moving toward.
The difference is audible in the quality of the description: the next thing is described with enthusiasm, which Sven always has, and with the specific forward lean of someone who is already thinking about the thing after the next thing. The destination is described differently: with the quality of someone who has arrived at the statement of something that has been true for a long time and that is only now being said fully.
The Naora conversation had this quality. Not the enthusiasm, though the enthusiasm was present. The arrival: the specific quality of someone describing the thing that the twenty-five years of movement had been movement toward, the thing that the accumulated capability and the accumulated experience and the accumulated restlessness had been building the capacity to do. I am not a sentimental person.
But I recognised something in that conversation that I had not heard in any of the previous ones, and the recognition was the recognition of a friend who has been watching someone become who they were always going to be and who is present at the moment the becoming is complete.
