Afterword:
What the Ocean Taught Me About Earth and Humanity

After the voyage—so harsh that malnutrition left ridged steps on my fingernails—I returned to Buenos Aires, 3,000 kilometers to the north, and then headed to Japan via Africa and Australia. I finally made it back home in the northern hemisphere's summer, four years later.

 

When I got off my sailboat and started living in a city, I realized that it was very different from the sea. There were no more waves crashing down on me from above and throwing me into the sea; no more injuries from falling in the cabin that moved several meters up and down; no more dark nights spent trembling in fear of running aground; no more looking up at the sky for signs of a storm, as if watching people's faces for a warning.

During the voyage, I was like a small animal, living in fear of natural enemies, in the vast wilderness of the sea.

 

Since when have humans been able to live their lives without fear of being hunted by other animals or threatened by the forces of nature? It must be a fortunate thing to live safely in a city, in a group, without fear of natural forces or natural enemies.

But while that kind of life goes on, I feel we've forgotten things essential to the future of humanity—memories from a distant past, perhaps the experiences of our ancestors as they fled from natural enemies, from ancient predators as terrifying as dinosaurs.
In other words, we've forgotten the laws of nature itself, those vital for survival in the wild: courage, instinct, and awareness.

 

Perhaps the reason I feel this way so strongly is that I left the world I was used to—the city—behind me and set sail. While living alone in the beauty and harshness of nature, my senses gradually became more refined, and I may have intuitively felt with every part of my body that the common sense of the cramped city was not the common sense of Earth.

As I sailed through the heart of the ocean, with no trace of humanity in sight, I saw the sun burning deep orange and the wind blowing across a sea of shining silver. In that timeless moment, I may have realized that they had all existed since the distant past. I may have understood in my heart that the common sense of modern society is not the common sense of Earth, which has existed for over four billion years.

Of course, I don't have the power to describe these details. Perhaps they cannot be put into words. It's something you can feel only with your skin, your muscles, or maybe even your internal organs—something you're not even sure exists, something you can't translate into language or symbols.

However, during the time I left behind my familiar group of people and risked my life to voyage across oceans, the storms, the calms, and the sun certainly taught me something.

When I think about it in the long run, I feel what they taught me would shape the fate of the people living on Earth. So, even if I can't express it in words, no matter how difficult it is, I have to convey it to you somehow—and I hope you can understand even a small part of it through this book.

 

Now that I've completed my solo voyage around the world and am living in a safe city, protected from outside threats, a new thought is rising in the center of my heart—one I cannot suppress.

Waves foamed white like winter mountains; the terror of blue ice crashing into my boat Aomi in the Antarctic; the pitch-black night when I drifted with a broken mast—I wonder if these things were really real. I feel like I was dreaming a long, long dream.

But when I think back carefully, I realize that I was vividly aware—through my own eyes, skin, and entire body—that I was truly alive on this beautiful water planet called Earth. There is no doubt about it.

If that was reality, and if that life-threatening journey was not a dream, then the peaceful city life I live in now must really be a dream. I still feel a strange sense of wonder, as if I've entered another world and never truly returned from the sea.

I even wonder, half-seriously, if there's any real difference between reality and dreams—or between being alive and being dead.