Last month, I went rowing for the first time, at Dunstaffnage on the Argyll coast.
The conditions were almost absurdly good. Calm sea, blue sky, a Saturday in late April that had decided to behave like June. Dunollie Castle on one side. Dunstaffnage Castle on the other. The kind of view people drive across Scotland to see.
I barely saw any of it.
I was too busy watching oar 1. Then watching the guy in front, who sat in front of me, to match his timing. Then back to oar 1, because I had drifted off rhythm. Then the guy in front again. Then a bit of internal monologue about how I was about to catch a crab and tip the boat. Then oar 1.
Twenty minutes or so of that. On one of the most beautiful stretches of coastline in Britain.
I noticed it on the drive home. The light coming off the water in a way that, somewhere in the back of my head, I knew I had already been in. I had been in it. I just hadn’t seen it.
I thought about that all evening. Because of course it isn’t really about a boat.
I work with people who are head-down in their own version of the boat. Watching the oar. Watching the colleague whose chaos has become the rhythm of their week. Watching the inbox. Watching for the next thing that might go wrong.
Some of them have told me, in slightly different words, the same thing: I think this might be a good period of my life and I’m somehow missing it.
That’s the sentence I keep coming back to. Not the dramatic kind of missing — not the deathbed regret. The everyday kind. The kind where the coastline is right there, and you spend two hours not looking at it because you’re managing oar 1.
I don’t think the answer is to stop watching the oar. The oar matters. You have to row.
But you can lift your head.
You can decide, deliberately, that for thirty seconds in every ten minutes you will look up and take in where you actually are. Not as a mindfulness technique. As a basic act of accounting — taking honest stock of what is in front of you, before it isn’t anymore.
Anail a Ghaidheil, air a mhullach. — The Gael’s breathing place is on the summit.
The summit isn’t a mountain. It’s whatever vantage point lets you see the thing you’re inside of.
What view are you missing right now?
Is obair làtha toiseachadh.