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Sailing is play with lots of hard work: both physical and mental. It requires brute strength and dexterity, deliberate focused concentration and passive observation.
It mirrors my best work, which is full of play. It’s creative: making connections. It’s convivial, full of energy and enthusiasm. It's autotelic: done for it's own sake.
Laborious play and ludic work both lead to flow states: when we are fully immersed and engaged in an activity that challenges our skills and abilities. We lose self-consciousness, gain senses of control and efficacy, plus immediate feedback we then adapt to.
This counters our culture’s typical work-play juxtapositions. Those who claim to “work hard and play hard”, usually mean they swing back and forth between drudgery and debauchery. At best, it entails the gamification of everyday tasks: which is just a playful veneer over a slogging reality.
This work within play—and play within work—embodies the Yin-Yang concept: everything is made up of competing, yet complementary forces. Think of dark and light, summer and winter, male and female. While these forces oppose each other, they are not necessarily opposite, as each contains an aspect of the other. For example, there cannot be a shadow without light.
And shadow likely led to this insight. The symbol graphs the daily progress of a pole's shadow length during the year. Think of the sail-shaped plate on a sundial. (In the west, we call it a “gnomon”, rooted via carpentry, in the term for "one that discerns or examines, interpreter, expert”. It’s about knowing—or “Lore”. see Lore X 4).)
This concept dates back 3500 years to the Yin Dynasty. It has influenced Taoism & Confucianism and Eastern culture to this day, such as in in traditional Chinese medicine, Feng Shui, and Tai Chi. And it has also seeped into the West. Carl Jung adapted into his own concepts, like the Shadow Self. Also, he showed how men (Yang) have female souls, called an “anima” (Yin), while women (Yin) each contain an “animus”, a male soul (Yang).
On the water, we can see and experience such interactions: the morning fog (Yin) gets dissipated by the heat of the sun (Yang); and that Yang, like a hot summer day, is more likely to bring the Yin of a sudden thunderstorm.
Yin and yang are not static or mutually exclusive, but interdependent and dynamic. They contain the seed of the other and balance each other. Sailing embodies this dynamic equilibrium. Most fundamentally, in our sails, we see the pair of pairs: thrust v. drag, lift v. weight in the four fundamental forces of aerodynamics. Also, we balance headsail & foresails. We experience the above-water perpendicular force of wind on the sail complementing the below-the-water opposing force on the keel.
We can see balance is many layered by returning to the first paragraph: Sailing not only balances play with hard work. Each of those balances the physical and then mental. And each of those in turn are balances: brute strength (Yang) and dexterity (Yin), deliberate focused concentration (Yang) and passive observation (Yin).
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