Send back the world
there’s too much view for me
the sky is much too high to shelter me when darkness falls
It’s odd the way life works. When you’re at home, convinced that you’ll never go anywhere, stuck working behind a counter day in and day out – you tend to have National Geographic style daydreams. Your mind drifts to exotic adventures in faraway places (with strange sounding names 
). You think that maybe one day you’ll go rock climbing, or zip lining, or hot air ballooning. You put together an imaginary life that would put Christopher Columbus to shame.
And for most people, those daydreams stay just that: day dreams.
When you work on ships you actually “have” that life that so many people daydream about. Seriously, you do – I mean, two days ago I was on an outrigger canoe on a river that ran under a mountain range. A few weeks before that I was on top of a mast dozens of feet above the Sydney Harbour. My day to day life resembles something out of a travel magazine.
So you know what we tend to daydream about? A ‘normal’ life. No, I mean it. My daydreams have gone domestic, whereas most people stare into space and think about seeing Mt Fuji or the Eiffel Tower (neither of which I’ve seen yet, but that’s beside the point), I spend ages thinking of what colour I want to paint the den of an apartment I don’t even have yet. I think about how wonderful it would be to get new filing cabinets (white, three drawers, with brass labels) for all my sheet music and a murphy bed for a non-existent guest room. I think about carpet colours and picture frames and being able to bake fresh chocolate chip cookies for visiting friends in my very own kitchen…of a house that smells like lilacs and salt spray and fresh baked bread, with walls the colour of gourmet mint ice-cream and a view that changes without the whole place having to move. I dream of a bright red door that locks behind me and keeps the rest of the world at bay.
People say that I sometimes don’t know how lucky I am. People envy the life I lead out here, they envy the fact that I live most people’s day dreams. And it’s true, I adore my job, and I love my life, but sometimes I’d trade all of it – the adventures, the rootlessness, the freedom, all of it – for that non-existent apartment.
Sometimes I’d trade it all for just a bit of normal….