Log-book 22-2-2020

When you sail for a month at the Ocean, you logically leave a lot of living creatures on land: family, friends, firm, employees, colleagues, dog, ... and plants. Because you know in advance that you are leaving them, you are trying to insure everything for them to survive, but you still cannot get everything prepared by 100%. So when you land again in your home port, you're worried about who survived and how. I am excited about what I found at home and at work after my return: not only did they handle the work and issues they hadn't solved before, because it was normally my job, but they were also strengthened, proud of how they managed with my absence. That totally excited me! I do not want to encourage anyone to leave your family or company for a longer period of time, but rather to share one important phenomenon that I discovered around this experience.

As I mentioned, besides everything walking, I left plants at home. You have to take care of them regularly and in addition to each flower a little differently. But it is almost non-transferable skill, and everyone does it his own way. So after my return, I watch my favorite home plant tree dropping leaves until it looks like it dies completely. Then suddenly they drop new leaves and voila, a plant that I had never known was blooming in our conditions was actually blossoming! Plus in the middle of winter! I hope it wasn't the last thing she could do; I remembered the agave that grows for years and then stretched all its strengths into a giant flower of the size and shape of the telegraph pole. The agave sends all its strength out and then dies and falls to the ground. I hope my home plant represents that type which modestly blooms under certain conditions and then grows calmly again.

People are like flowers, they each need their individual care and sometimes bloom, at a different time, otherwise intensely and differently in color. Just as every plant blooms differently, people bloom differently. On board we had a colleague, who was all the time just joking and doing some stupid things. So I stopped taking his ideas and advice seriously. We had a patrol together and one night he started tapping the navigation device until we completely lost the original map and thus the route and course overview. Above us was an incredibly clean and undisturbed starry sky, it was a dark night and we began to panic a little. At that moment, the foolish colleague began to sprinkle the constellation names as if reading them from a book. He immediately orientated himself, dismantling the entire starry sky in about a minute, and at the top determined how to get on the right course. Perhaps it has never happened to me that someone so undervalued surprise me so positively! Just the right moment, a little crisis, insecurity, pressure and fear came which suddenly pulled his knowledge of astrology, which he has developed since childhood as his precious hobby. It does not have to be always the crisis that makes the plant or the man bloom. All you need are different conditions, different care, different chair, different team. Give everyone a chance to show the best they can. And do not underestimate, based on one impression or inexperience, as I have recently, give people the conditions to flourish.