The Sailor and The Diver

I've found that there are two ways of living life. Here's how I try to make the most of them.

Welcome to Making Time. Each week, I share thoughts and ideas for making more time for yourself by building creative energy and establishing rituals and practices. This year, I’m also attempting The 2024 Slowdown, which you can do with me. If you’d like to follow along, you can subscribe for free.

Do you ever have those moments in which your brain spontaneously seems to shift gears, and you go from your usual state of mundane thoughts, fretting, and planning to suddenly feeling absolutely alive to the moment you’re in?

I noticed one of these the other day. The moment was otherwise bland in every way, simply standing over an ironing board removing wrinkles from the dress I wanted to wear.

For some reason, I began to notice the warmth and smell of the steam as I watched it rise toward me and dissipate. I noticed the weight of the iron in my hand. I watched the wrinkles release as I pressed them. My whole body slowed down and for only a few minutes, I became immersed in that particular moment in time.

There seem to be two completely different modes in which to experience the world, which I’ve begun to think of as The Sailor and The Diver. Understanding what these two modes are, how they work, and cultivating the ability to switch between them has been one of the greatest discoveries in my life.

Two Modes of Living

The idea that we have different personalities within us with distinct ways of comprehending the world is not new.

Carl Jung called them “archetypes” and named some of the most important ones, while also pointing out that the number of different archetypes is limitless. A newer take on this is Internal Family Systems, which labels these as “parts” within the psyche, and gives protocols for communicating with them.

Both of these frameworks acknowledge that we have a multitude of different personas, each with a role to play, and that they interact with and even contradict each other. It’s important to remember that in both systems, there are no “good” and “bad” parts, just different roles.

Another way of looking at this is through the structure of the brain itself. According to Iain McGilchrist, there is a right brain and a left brain way of experiencing the world, and we tend to let the left brain take over far too often.

Each hemisphere has a different way of attending to the world, which completely changes our perception of our environment. He writes, “Things change according to the stance we adopt towards them, the type of attention we pay to them, the disposition we hold in relation to them. This is important because the most fundamental difference between the hemispheres lies in the type of attention they give to the world.”

In mindfulness teachings, entering a state of presence is something to practice and return to again and again. Jon Kabat-Zinn defines mindfulness in this way: “Mindfulness is awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgementally.” Though our minds are conditioned toward distraction, through practice we can enter this state of attention more often.

These are all helpful frameworks that point to a common experience, which is that there are moments when we feel utterly in touch with ourselves and the world around us, fully appreciating whatever is happening. Sometimes, these moments are filled with wonder, and sometimes they are painful, but you feel yourself right here, right now.

And then there is the rest of life which we seem to buzz through as quickly as possible, addicted to checking things off, scoring ourselves, and moving on to the next thing.

The more I learn how to recognize which mode I’m in, and the more I’m able to switch between these two modes, the slower time seems to go. I’m able to focus on process over result. I care more deeply about myself and the world around me. I have more compassion. I consistently feel amazed by the beauty of the everyday and I feel more capable and creative.

The tricky part, as always, is remembering – remembering you’re alive, in a body, in a vast and mysterious world full of unknowably complex creatures and limitless beauty. It’s so easy to forget.

I find metaphors extremely helpful for remembering things like this, so here’s how I conceptualize that shift. I’m not the first person to develop a metaphor like this, but this particular one has been useful for me in daily life.

Who Are The Sailor and The Diver?

Imagine that your mind is a sailboat. There are two characters on this boat, and they are both there with the intention to make your life better.

The first one is the sailor. The sailor helps you navigate the sea and gets you from place to place. The sailor is extremely goal-oriented and likes to have a plan, a map, a compass, and a lot of technical knowledge.

Sometimes the seas are calm and serene, and sometimes they are choppy and dangerous. The sailor is skilled at looking ahead and trying to prepare for the future (which sometimes leads to anxiety), and learning lessons from the past (which sometimes leads to ruminating). But the sailor likes to keep moving and doing, always vigilant about what came before and what might happen soon.

And then you have the other character on this boat, the Diver. The Diver’s job is to go deep in one particular spot. The Diver gets the boat to stop, goes below the surface of that particular moment, and looks around. The Diver does not have a particular agenda or task to do, but has the job of exploring what is actually there, beneath the waves. It turns out to be a rich world, full of unseen beauty and enormous feelings, totally invisible to The Sailor.

Most of the time, I go through life in Sailor mode, trying to get things done and accomplish whatever the next step is. I worry. I think about what I did wrong. I try to amass more resources. I problem solve. I plan. I execute the plan. I keep going.

But sometimes, I can stop wherever I am and shift into Diver mode. In those moments, I let the Sailor take a break while I dive deeper into the single moment that I’m living. I notice the taste and feel of the coffee as I take a sip, the feeling of the smooth ceramic mug in my hand, the sound of my cat lapping water in the next room, the little tingles and pulses going on in my own body. I wake up to the fact that I am alive in an incredibly beautiful and sorrowful world and often feel utterly amazed by it.

And, eventually, I surface again and keep moving.

Remember, We Need Both

I’ve felt these two modes of being all my life, but when I first started practicing mindfulness decades ago, I made the mistake of believing that one mode is “good” and the other is “bad.” I thought that the object of practice was to get to some sort of enlightened state where I felt present all the time, unburdened by my thoughts.

And perhaps if you want to live a monastic life, that could be true. But most of us have dreams and visions for our future. We have obligations to meet for others, and goals we want to accomplish. Perhaps most importantly, we find purpose in doing things and creating. It gives our life meaning.

The Sailor helps us to do that. The Sailor is the one that takes the Diver to various places worth exploring. Without my internal Sailor, life would surely be less meaningful for me.

But without The Diver, I only flit along the surface of life, going from place to place without ever really understanding where I am and how utterly strange and beautiful it is. If the Diver isn’t activated, life starts to feel like an endless journey where nothing is ever good enough. The world seems devoid of magic, a mechanistic slog to an unknown destination I’ll never actually arrive at.

The Sailor Wants Control

The other thing to understand about these two characters is that The Sailor believes herself to be far more important than she is, and rarely wants to take the time to stop and let the Diver explore. Iain McGilchrist writes that these two sides of ourselves need to cooperate, but instead are often involved in a power struggle.

The Sailor is perfectly content to never go below the surface to understand my actual experience of life, to never explore myself or my world, to never ask the harder questions or simply be open to what’s actually happening.

The Sailor does not care about rest, about stopping to look at the moon, about really observing a piece of art, about appreciating a new piece of music, or about noticing that subtle tingle in my belly. She thinks there are more important things to accomplish, and not enough time to do them. She wants to move on to the next thing.

What’s more, we live in a world that encourages moving along the surface without every stopping. We’re rewarded for getting things done, whether or not they actually mean anything to us.

This is why mindfulness practice has become so important to me. It is no longer about trying to overcome the “lesser” part of myself. Instead, I see the value of both while also recognizing that The Sailor has a tendency to be quite controlling.

The first step is simply noticing when this is happening, which can be difficult when The Sailor is in charge. But with practice, at any moment throughout my day, I can ask myself if I’m in Sailor mode or Diver mode.

Only then can I remind myself to stop, take a deep breath, and spend just a few moments going deeper and seeing what’s right in front of me. Otherwise, life is all surface.

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