A Wind in My Sails

This was originally written in 2014.

English is a funny, wonderful language filled with words that perfectly describe things.

This isn’t always the case, such as with words like “chutzpah” and “schadenfreude.” Schadenfreude is a German word to describe taking pleasure in the misfortunes of other. Chutzpah is Yiddish meaning something close to audacity, but not really. With neither, English words just don’t do the meanings justice.

There are plenty of English words — keeping mind that much of our language borrows heavily from others, especially Latin — that are perfect. “Fork,” for instance, is a perfect word describing not only an eating utensil (another perfect word), but a branch in a road.

The word that has been going through my head lately, sadly enough, is “doldrums.” Maybe it’s because of a long winter, or various other things in my life right now. I don’t know what my issue is or if it’s just a combination of things, but I do know that “doldrums” describes it sufficiently. At the very least, I haven’t sunk into ennui, a French word describing some sort of artistic depression.

The word “doldrums” — a loss of wind — comes from maritime tradition when the only thing to keep a ship moving forward was the power of the wind in the sails. The doldrums have since been identified as a true meteorological phenomena that occurs in the waters around the equator. It has to do with the spin of the Earth and other such scientific facts. The word itself is rooted in the Latin word for “stupid.” Go figure.

To a ship sailing across the ocean, the loss of winds to fill the sails could be fatal. There were only so much food and water aboard a ship and long delays until the next port could result in starvation. In the Joseph Conrad stories I’ve read, they also tend to spur crews into madness and mutiny, but I don’t know if that is true or just a literary device.

So here I am in the doldrums, my sails have no wind. The question is what is there to do about this? The answer, from my extensive research of skimming the maritime stories and novels of Conrad, Melville and company doesn’t help. Problems arose when I realized that maritime stories and novels from the 19th century are, for the most part, boring and filled with allegories my obtuse mind can’t grasp. As I said previously, when the doldrums were used as a device in these stories, it usually led to a mutiny. This doesn’t make much sense to me. I get that lack of food and water can make you a little crazy, but how is that the captain’s fault?

The usual, and only, course of action for a ship’s crew when faced with the doldrums is to ration your supplies and wait it out.

On a personal level, this seems a little passive. When we say we are in the doldrums, we are speaking metaphorically. As humans, our existential winds are usually under our own control. If our sails lose wind, we are expected to come up with our own gusts. Not so on a ship in the middle of the ocean.

Then again, maybe Conrad was on to something. Maybe on a personal level the only way to defeat the doldrums is to wait it out, to keep an eye out for the prevailing winds and be ready when they come. Perhaps we spend too much time trying to figure our way out of problems that they just create more problems (such as madness or mutiny).

Like I said, English is a funny language. Maybe I should worry more about why the plural of goose is geese, but the plural of moose is not meese.