"He overtakes us and snatches the last berth for our size of boat. You have to imagine that!" we hear from the neighbouring boat as we sit calmly and smile at each other. "We then had to move to a bigger berth and pay more. He didn't thank us properly either. We didn't even get a beer. That was the last time we helped someone after they had run aground. That's the very last thing!"
Outrageous, of course. But - do you have to be angry about it? Does it change anything about the other person's behaviour? No. So why get upset? Accept it, laugh about it, forget it. You'll never understand some people, but from a certain age you deal with it differently. It's like this.
That is also interesting:
Let's take a look at the water and see the sailors between 20 and 30. Speed is extremely important there; they often make a rushed impression. When my husband talks about regatta sailing when he was young, the situations he describes are full of dynamism, ambition and the will to win. Fast, faster, winner. Young people want to react quickly, make quick decisions, act faster, and yes, they also get quick-tempered. The last berth is snatched away - this can be compared to a personal defeat, it is a disregard for one's own efforts, one's own ability, one's own ambition. But now comes the good news: it gets better with age.
Something has changed over the years
I started sailing myself when I was 36 years old. My husband wasn't quite young either at 40 - and of course he was already sailing at the age of 4 - but he was still young enough to get excited. At the time, he acted as if everything depended on him. That he had to assert himself. To show that he was attentive, experienced and determined. To give his best! Even when sailing. Fortunately, things are different today.
Something has changed over the years, very quietly and almost imperceptibly. It's not that we have become indifferent to everything. On the contrary, most of us love sailing more today than ever before. But we have learnt to distinguish between what is essential and what just passes by like a gust of wind.
Nowadays, if someone snatches the last berth from under our noses, we hardly flinch inwardly, but take the gear out, let the boat glide slowly on and think: 'Then we'll just find one on the next jetty. Or in the next harbour. Or we wait a bit. Someone is bound to leave somewhere soon, or we'll find some corner that we've overlooked so far. And even if we've decided to continue our journey, it's not bad luck. After all, it's part of our journey. Yes, it's like that: We used to only see the destination. Today, however, we also see the journey.
Composure increases with age, pressure decreases
For a long-term study, researchers at Penn State in the US state of Pennsylvania followed around 3,000 people aged between 25 and 74 over a period of 20 years. The scientists focussed on the days in these people's lives when they were confronted with a particularly high number of stressors. For those in their mid-20s, this was almost half of all days, while 70-year-olds only experienced around a third of their days as particularly stressful.
This can also be wonderfully recognised when sailing. Calmness increases with age, the pressure decreases - at least most of the time. Even loud music and bawling on the jetty don't get so annoying at some point. Well, it may also be due to the fact that you hear less as you get older.
We have often seen young crews full of energy and exuberance partying the night away as if there was no tomorrow. In the past, we would have danced along, but at some point we would have felt that it was a disturbance to our own peace and quiet and disrespectful to the other people in the harbour. We would lie in our bunk and get annoyed by music, every noise, every voice that was too loud, every laugh. Today we hear it differently. It is the sound of youth, the beginning of a path that you have travelled yourself. We know that even younger people will become quieter one day. Maybe then, like us now, they will just smile at those who come after them.
"Something about getting older leads to fewer stressors in life," explains study leader David Almeida, professor of human development and family science at Penn State. "This may be related to the social roles we fill as we age. As younger people, we have to juggle more at work, in the family and at home." All of this leads to daily stress. The researcher goes on to explain: "As we age, our social roles and motivation change. Older people often want to make the most of the time they have left."
Everyone has started once, everyone has made mistakes
There are many other things that don't upset you. If someone is unsure when putting on their coat and has to put it on several times, the older generation watches patiently and offers help instead of rolling their eyes inwardly. There's the tension in people's eyes, the searching looks, the uncertainty, and I recognise myself in them. In the past, I might have thought: "Why can't he do better than that?" or "How stupid is she?" and would have looked forward to a bit of harbour cinema. Today, I automatically think: 'I'll help'.
If someone hangs their fenders too high or too low, if a line is incorrectly attached or if a manoeuvre seems awkward and completely wrong, I - now 60 - no longer feel superior. And no arrogance either. You know how little such things say about a person. Apart from that: Everyone started out once. Everyone has made mistakes.
We change as we get older, and that's a good thing. There's a time for everything, as the saying goes. And why waste the time you have left by getting upset and annoyed with others? It all has to do with the different age generations. We used to roll our eyes when an older person said: "I'm going to take a nap." An afternoon nap? Wasted time! Nowadays, I'm happy if I can go to my bunk in the foredeck for an hour at the weekend - it's even nicer on board, of course. Saturday lunchtime in the harbour, no sailing planned, just lie down and listen to the seagulls and the children playing and the voices on the jetty and then doze off. Marvellous!
Learning to adapt over the decades
We no longer get upset about the "wrong wind" either. We used to get so angry when it didn't blow the way we wanted it to. When it left even though we had planned a route, or when it suddenly returned and disrupted our plans. Today, you just take it as it comes. There's no other choice, because it's pointless to nag the wind or ask it to do what you want it to do. Over the decades, we have learnt to adapt. It's a much more pleasant and conflict-free life. There are those days when you can only make slow progress for hours on end.
In the past, it would have driven us crazy. When I think of my husband - now in his mid-60s - he would have been constantly looking at his watch, calculating, planning, pushing and grumbling. Today, he stands - most of the time - by the bike and watches the water, and he feels a calmness that I didn't recognise in him before. Most of the time anyway. Of course, there are still situations that upset him, because everyone is different - but things have really improved.
Hardly anything upsets me anymore. When a fellow sailor tips over a coffee pot with a full, wet filter and then everything seeps into the bilge forever. When a line gets tangled. When something has to be done twice because you didn't do it right the first time. We used to be impatient with ourselves, today we are lenient. We have learnt that perfection is wishful thinking. And that the important thing is not to do everything flawlessly, but to be on task.
It is as if the relationship to time has changed
The research team was able to work out another exciting aspect from the results: When they experienced stress, this had a much greater impact on the mood of the younger test subjects. The older people, on the other hand, showed a sunny disposition even on stressful days - they were able to deal with the challenges in a more relaxed manner. Overall, David Almeida's team found that people in their mid-50s were the least stressed and also showed the greatest resilience in dealing with stressors. Between their late 60s and early 70s, there was a slight increase in stress levels, mainly due to the mental and physical challenges of ageing. However, people of this age were on average much more relaxed about stress than people in their 20s and 30s.
We no longer get upset about younger sailors who push in front of us when looking for a berth or are in a hurry on the jetty, but we recognise them above all with their tense movements, their quick glances and their restlessness. We recognise ourselves in them, just as we used to be. And then there is this quiet understanding. These sailors are still travelling on a journey that we have already completed.
It's as if the relationship with time has changed. It used to be something that drove you. Something you worked against. Today it is something that carries you. We no longer have the feeling of missing out on something. Every day on the water is complete. Sometimes we sit in the cockpit in the evening, when the harbour slowly becomes quiet, the light softer and darker, the voices quieter; everything slows down. You see the boats around you, each with its own story, and see the people on them who have the same passion as we do, and then we feel a deep satisfaction without being able to say exactly where it comes from.
You sail simply to be
It is - at least for me - a feeling of happiness in my heart. I wondered for a long time how I should interpret this feeling, and at some point I figured it out: It's not the satisfaction of having achieved everything. It's the satisfaction of no longer having to achieve anything. Age has given you something that you didn't even miss when you were young: Serenity. It doesn't stop the wind from blowing or the waves from coming. We no longer have to prove anything to anyone. We know what we can do and also what we can't do. And both are absolutely fine. It's no longer important to be first in the harbour, but to get on and off the boat safely. This serenity has brought a new lightness to our older lives. We take everything as it comes, sit in the cockpit for longer without doing anything. We feel that this is enough.
Sometimes I think that we are better off on board today after all these years, not because we know or can do more, but because we no longer need so much. For sailors, this is perhaps the greatest gift of getting older: you no longer sail to get somewhere. You simply sail to be. And if someone snatches the last free berth from us today, we just smile about it and perhaps even think back to how important it once was to us. Or if someone laughs out loud somewhere on the jetty, we simply laugh too. Or at least we smile. Allow the laughter. It's as simple as that. Everything has its time.
And so I would like to end with what I think is a very wise African proverb: the grass does not grow faster if you pull on it.
Steffi von Wolff
Freie Autorin
