While I’m not much of a sailor, I do like boat metaphors. Since I dedicated my last piece to starting a new leg of a journey, it only makes sense that I dedicate this piece to the logistics of setting sail. It’s all well and good to gaze star-eyed at the ocean and dream of uncharted lands beyond the horizon, but if you don’t properly repair, provision, and crew your boat, your grand adventure is more likely to end on a reef than it is on unknown shores. It is important to dream; it’s even more important to plan how you’ll make that dream a reality.

For now, let’s talk about the idea of ballast on our boat of life. Real world ballast is literally dead weight that holds a boat down so it can stay upright and sail; metaphorical ballast is our life’s “dead weight” that keeps us upright. Ballast is humble, heavy, cumbersome, and critical to any boat going any distance over water; too little and the boat flips over at the first breeze, too much and it goes straight to the bottom of the sea, so getting the right amount is incredibly important. It is the same with our own metaphorical ballast; we need to be mindful of how much dead weight we bring on board if we want to sail smoothly.

This metaphor may sound strange, as the idea of dead weight often has negative connotations to it. The person not contributing to your group project is dead weight, those old batteries you have in your car’s trunk are dead weight, lingering feelings for your ex are emotional dead weight, and so on. The idea of “jettisoning the dead weight” is a time honored metaphor for getting rid of unnecessary burdens so you can move on with your life. The idea is a good one (and should still be practiced!), but the notion that all dead weight is bad simply isn’t true. We all have some dead weight in our lives that is critical to our physical and emotional wellbeing; we just don’t think of it as dead weight.

Here’s an example: clothing. Clothing’s only purpose is to cover a person’s nakedness, and literally nothing else. While some people get very creative with the kinds of clothing they wear (the fashion industry would not exist otherwise) and some clothing has a very specific use (i.e. winter coats, swimsuits, hiking boots etc.,) it does not change the essential function of clothing: to make sure we’re not naked. But by not being naked, we can interact with people in basic ways without causing trouble; we can go into public buildings if we’re wearing shoes, we can talk to people without upsetting them by wearing pants, and we can usually maintain another person’s eye contact by wearing shirts. So even though clothing just sits there and does one thing, it’s a very important thing that allows us function in daily society.

There are many examples of this kind of dead weight in our lives; eating, working, and sleeping for instance. Each of these serves a critical role in our daily lives: if you don’t eat, you die; if you don’t work, you don’t get money and you can’t buy anything; if you don’t sleep, you gradually become more and more exhausted until you can’t even string a single coherent sentence together. As such, rather than unnecessarily weighing us down these serve as stabilizing influences that keep us alive, financially solvent and lucid.

I mentioned at the beginning that we should be mindful of how much dead weight we bring onboard; we must also be mindful of what kinds of dead weight we’re bringing. If we think of eating, working and sleeping as central ballast (i.e. really big weights that sit in the middle of our ship,) we can think other things like exercising, hobbies, dating etc. as ancillary ballast (i.e. smaller weights that fill the spaces in around the larger weights). While ancillary ballast doesn’t keep the ship down on its own, it absolutely changes how the ship sits in the water. For example, too much ancillary ballast on one side causes the ship to lean that direction; for us, that might mean putting too much time into a hobby, which causes us to neglect other things.

It is this ancillary ballast that will cause the majority of our headaches in life, either by including too much or not enough of it. Fortunately, it is also the easiest to change; instead of physically moving weights to different portions of our boat, we just change how much time we dedicate to certain things. Each comes with its own challenges, of course, but in time we can eventually get our boat balanced for the journey we want to take.

Take me, for example. I want to be a writer, so I just spent two days figuring out how to use boat ballast as a metaphor for how personal habits influence your life. Does this mean I’m now ready to compete with George. R. R. Martin? Absolutely not.

But I straightened my boat a little bit; and I’m going to straighten it a little bit more tomorrow.