Panic Attacks and Plans : An Unexpected Spring Voyage

“Oh, yeah I lost myself tonight

Oh, trying to find my horizon line

I'm trying to find my way back home

Trippin on the cobblestones

Need a friend in the dead of night

Don′t know if I'm gonna laugh or cry”

 

Sez Szabo, Figure It Out

 

Questions and Decisions

 

We have never been ones for making plans very far in advance. More often than not, our journeys have taken shape on the spur of the moment.  With the decision to set out arising at the conclusion of another journey, when one path opened as the precious adventure came to an end.  Though it might seem chaotic to some, it is an approach that has always felt natural to us.  It has given us a certain freedom and a sense that our travels and movement throughout the world were revealed, showing us what came next.

 

Over the past few months, we have worked throughout the winter, considered a number of different trails to hike in the coming year and tentatively considered where our travels might yet take us. There is no denying that nothing was certain and nothing was yet set.  That is reflective of how we generally set out - lots of ideas and then sudden decisions.  

 

However, over the course of the last few days and weeks, something shifted in ways that I did not expect.

 

As our contracts came to an end and spring began, a number of challenges began to converge all at once.  There were increasing difficulties where we live, growing concerns about what the coming months might hold, and a series of conversations that made it clear that change - significant change - was no longer something abstract or distant. It was immediate, and it would undeniably shape what options we had in the coming year …and possibly well beyond. 

 

In that space, I found myself being asked to think and make choices about decisions that do not come easily. 

 

Questions about what comes next, where people will live, and how to balance responsibility with the life we have built for ourselves. These are not questions that can be approached the way we set out on a trail or a voyage. They do not come with maps, distances, or clear endpoints.  They come with deeper uncertainty and wider-ranging lasting impact.

 

What unsettled me most was not any one question, but the sudden weight of all of them together.

For years, we have lived in motion and set our own course. From the Trans Canada Trail to the pilgrimages across Europe, from rail journeys to ocean crossings, there has always been a sense that the path continued forward. Even when the days were difficult, there was direction. There was movement.

 

Lately, that feeling has begun to change.

 

It is difficult to explain exactly when the shift occurred, but it has brought with it an awareness of how quickly time moves when life becomes centred on routines and the necessities of urgent moments or the care of others.  Perhaps this is more striking for two people used to simply managing what is in our backpacks, or the landscapes in front of us, and navigating the world day by day and step by step. What begins as a temporary adjustment can, over the years, become something much longer. Plans are set aside. Movement slows. Possibilities become more limited and narrow out - not all at once, but gradually, almost without notice.

 

I have seen how that kind of time – months, years, and decades – passes by quicker than one ever expected.

 

Years ago, I watched a situation that was expected to be a short period, but which slowly extended into something much longer. What began with the understanding that there would be time later - time to travel, to pursue long-held retirement plans, to return to the hopes of living - shifted as those years passed by. There was no single moment when things changed, no clear dividing line. Just the steady passage of time, carrying everything forward with it.

 

That is what I found myself thinking about. And if I am honest, I found myself thinking about this a lot.

 

Not in terms of any one person, or situation, or decision that has to now be made.  But in terms of time itself, and how easily it can pass while you are focused on everything that needs to be done. There is a hard weight in that realization. Not because those responsibilities lack meaning, or because I want to avoid them….but because I am not yet ready to give up the sense of motion that has defined so much of our lives and so much of who I am. 

 

A Sense of Time

 

I still want to explore. I still want to travel. I still want to continue the line we have been drawing across maps and landscapes for years.  And yet, at the same time, I can feel how quickly that sense of possibility can begin to narrow, and possibly how it can disappear entirely in a very short time.

 

These days, I find myself thinking about how quickly time is already passing. It feels as though I could close my eyes and be standing at the beginning of the Trans Canada Trail again -  preparing to set out across the country. That moment does not feel distant. It feels immediate, it feels like yesterday. 

 

And yet, that was more than six years ago now.  Six years that seem, in some ways, to have passed in an instant.  The journey of a lifetime might as well have been a dream that has come and gone. 

 

In the midst of all of this – these types of thoughts and realizations - something in me began to give way.

 

At first, it was subtle - a sense of unease, of not quite being able to settle. Then it built into something more physical. I stopped being able to sleep.  Then I began having chest pains.  Then one day, I felt as though I could not catch my breath – as though someone was sitting on my chest. My hands would not stop shaking. Thoughts came faster than I could sort them. Two days later, I collapsed.

 

In the days that followed, the anxiety and problems within me did not fully subside. It came in waves - quickly, unexpectedly and difficult to manage. At times, I found myself reacting sharply, snapping at people for reasons that, even in the moment, I knew did not justify the response.  I screamed at Sean for not folding the laundry “right” and sat down crying when we no longer had ice cream in the freezer. 

 

Seeking help proved more complicated than expected. What I encountered instead was a series of deferrals and suggestions.  Walk-in Clinics told me to go to a local hospital, which in turn told me to go to another hospital “because stress is not an emergency”.   In Ontario, I was sent from London to Woodstock and back - constantly pushed on by because "mental stress was not a priority" in the region's overworked hospitals.   What I was left with was the sense that - as with so much else - I would need to find my own way through it for now. That, more than anything, reinforced the feeling of being left to navigate something without a clear path forward.  In this situation – one in which I desperately wanted a trail sign or blaze – there was nothing but myself and my mind to find the way back. 

 

There are few situations more difficult than the sense that you are losing control, while at the same time being unable to change the conditions that are causing it.

 

One moment in particular brought all of this into focus.

 

In an effort to calm down, to shift our at-home routine, we walked to a nearby coffee shop. It should have been a simple moment, a few hours in a quiet space, a chance to sit, to breathe, to regain some sense of equilibrium. Instead, the room filled quickly, noise rising in all directions. Conversations overlapped with music, people played YouTube videos loudly, and the sense of quiet I had hoped for dissolved almost immediately.

 

Sitting there, I could feel the tension building again. When I found myself on the verge of screaming at people, attacking people, reacting in a way that would not have reflected who I want to be, I realized that something needed to change.

 

Thankfully, seeing how I was about to react, Sean prompted us to leave and head home.  En route, I berated him for things that were, in all honesty, nothing.  I yelled at him for petty things.   I felt as though I had to get the frustrations, the fears, and the indecisiveness out of me.   And he took it all, without comment.   He listened, he let me yell, and let me vent.

 

There is no suggestion that I was anything but unkind in that moment. I took my hatred out on him, and he took it without response ...he listened even though he is dealing with all the same challenges as I am.  

 

Back at home, I continued to fume… thinking of how I was feeling, knowing how I was reacting and aware of the things I was saying.   It was clear that something had to change. 

 

In two hours, I was on the phone with Windstar reserving a place on Wind Surf’s transatlantic voyage from Sint Maarten to Lisbon.    I needed to move again. I needed to be in a place of tranquillity, natural wonder, and peacefulness.  I needed these things to find the space to figure out what to do next. 

There was no long deliberation. No careful planning. Just a decision made in the moment.

As a result, we have less than thirty-six hours to prepare. Flights to arrange. Bags to pack.  Suits and dresses to be dry-cleaned.   The route chosen will hopefully give us space to consider what comes after. The logistics are both quick and familiar, but the circumstances feel different this time.

 

Restoring Balance or Escaping?

 

In the moments that have followed from that phone call, a question has begun to take shape - one that I cannot fully or even honestly answer.

 

Throughout the years, whether setting out onto a trail or stepping aboard a ship, I have always framed these departures as a way to reset perspective. To spend time in nature. To step away from the noise and return with greater clarity.  Lately, I have begun to wonder to what extent that remains true.

 

Is this constant movement, continual hiking and setting out on voyages toward the sea a way of restoring balance, or is it a form of escape? 

 

I can certainly see how this type of life can be seen as a means of trying to not grow up or refusing to take on responsibility, but that has never in my heart and mind been the goal.  Yet the question is there - is this a means of finding balance or simply another form of escape?  I honestly don’t know. 

 

What I do know is that the world, at times, feels increasingly difficult to navigate. That the pressures we carry - individually and collectively - seem to accumulate faster than they resolve. And that, in the midst of that, the ability to step back, to gain distance, feels not like a luxury or an escape, but more like a necessity.

 

In that light, returning to Wind Surf feels like a step toward something I recognize.

It is a sailing vessel, small by comparison to many ships, carrying a very limited number of passengers. It moves with the wind when it can, and yields to weather and uses its engines when it must. On previous voyages, we have seen how quickly plans can change, how routes can shift, and how little control one ultimately has over the open ocean.  And yet, within that uncertainty, there is also a kind of calling and a sense of trust that it will either give us or show us what we need.

 

A sense that not everything needs to be resolved immediately. That clarity does not always come from forcing decisions or completing a trail in its entirety, but from giving doubts, uncertainties and fears space to shape into something understandable.

That is what I am hoping for now.  Not to leave these questions behind, but to find a way to carry them without them overwhelming me. To allow them to settle into a form that can be understood, rather than reacted to. To place them within a wider horizon where they might feel less immediate, less terrifying, and hopefully become perhaps more manageable.

 

In setting out, in returning to the ocean, and a ship I love, I hope there is peace of mind, I hope there is a path to clarity, and if I am very lucky, a means to seeing an answer and a resolution to what lies ahead.

 

The ocean and nature do not change the passage of time, but they do change how we sit within the world and the circumstances we navigate. Out there, the world is stripped back to its essentials, scale and perspective are restored, and we are given the free time to find our way back to understanding. 

 

For now, that is what I am hoping to find.

 

“…it is a bit of a stormy sea inside, and the waters are calm out here…”

See you on board.