Let me tell you directly what the Pacific crossing is, because the description I am about to give is the description that loses some people and that is exactly the description that the right people need to hear. The Pacific crossing from the Galapagos to the Marquesas is twenty-two days.
For most of those twenty-two days, the horizon is the horizon. Water in every direction. The same sky overhead. The same trade wind from behind. The same swell from the same direction. The flying fish. The watch rotation. The meals. The conversations. The sleep. The next watch. The same horizon.
If you need the experience to deliver a new stimulus every four hours, a new city, a new activity, a new visual landscape, the Pacific crossing is not for you. This is not a failure on your part or on the crossing’s part. It is the honest description of the mismatch between what the crossing provides and what you currently need from an experience.
The crossing does not apologise for what it is. It is not designed for the person who needs constant stimulation. It is designed, if a twenty-two day stretch of open ocean can be said to be designed for anything, for the person who has been running at the constant stimulation for long enough that the absence of it is not boredom but relief.
What the Unchanging Horizon Produces
The person who arrives at the Pacific crossing having been running at the professional intensity of the senior career for ten or fifteen years, and who stands at the bow on day five and looks at the horizon in every direction and registers it as the same horizon it was on day four, discovers something specific in the sameness: the specific quality of the attention that the unchanging horizon does not deflect.
At home, the attention moves continuously between the stimuli that the environment provides. The phone, the conversation, the next obligation, the previous one. On the Pacific crossing, day five, the attention has nowhere to move. The horizon is the horizon. The attention that has been moving continuously for the last decade sits with the horizon and the horizon sits back.
What happens in this sitting is not nothing. It is the specific quality of the undirected attention, the attention that is fully awake and has no stimulus competing for it, that the meditation practice tries to produce through discipline and that the Pacific crossing produces through the simple fact of the three weeks of the same horizon.
The thoughts that arrive in this state are not the thoughts that the professional life produces. They are the thoughts that the professional life has been postponing for the duration of the professional life, waiting for the quiet that the professional life never provides. The Pacific crossing provides it for twenty-two days. What you think about in those twenty-two days is yours. The horizon will be there the whole time.
