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A playful and dramatic way to emphasize the nature of purpose as a movement forward towards something precise~yet~ambiguous off on the horizon.

Sir Francis Chichester Dialogue

(adapted from Learning As a Way of Being by Peter Vaill)

[I composed the following fantasized dialogue after reading the journal accounts of thirtyfive M.B.A. students, in which they described their attempts to understand the group processes of small task teams they had been members of. Most of the accounts expressed considerable frustration. The dominant theme was that they felt they did not know what they were supposed to be learning. At this time, I had also been reading Sir Francis Chichester's Gypsy Moth Circles the World, an account of his solo voyage during 1966 and 1967. After I had written the dialogue, I showed it to the students. Some of them saw the point of it, but many did not.]

STUDENT: Sir Francis, you have been extremely effective at setting and reaching difficult goals. I have some questions for you.

CHICHESTER: Yes?

STUDENT: I am pursuing a particular goal, together with a few friends of mine. We have spent much time on it and worked very hard. I’m not sure I’m learning what I’m supposed to be learning on the project….

C: Hmmmmm.

STUDENT: So I want to know what I am supposed to be getting out of this experience.

C: I do not know how to get things out of experiences.

STUDENT: But you’ve been many places. You’ve done heroic things. Few men have faced death as often as you. You must have learned something from these experiences.

C: Oh, I have indeed.

STUDENT: It appears to me that you have to be tremendously skillful at planning and at preparing yourself and your boat. You’ve learned how to do these things so that you’re more effective at reaching goals than if you just causally decided on a Sunday afternoon to go off for a sail around the world. You certainly don’t do that, do you?

C: No, indeed.

STUDENT: Then how can you say you haven’t learned from your experiences?

C: I didn’t.

STUDENT: Then what is the key?

C: You seem to have a theory that I am a person with-a-key. But what I am is an explorer. Have you considered what it is to be an explorer?

STUDENT: Well, it’s doing new things, and it can be dangerous and probably lonely and probably expensive. But people have always gone exploring, so it’s obviously exciting and rewarding.

C: Yes, it is all those things. But have you considered what it is to be an explorer?

STUDENT: Besides what I just mentioned?

C: Yes.

STUDENT: Well, it’s probably emotional. I recall your writing about smashing your elbow when you were off the coast of Africa, and sailing a thousand miles with it inflamed and learning to drain fluid from it yourself. It must have been terrible.

C: Yes, besides the pain, I was quite frightened that the elbow would become infected. That whole experience was exploration.

STUDENT: You mean you felt, “That’s the breaks,” as we Americans say?

C: No, I mean learning the anatomy and physiology of my elbow was exploration.

STUDENT: I’m not following you.

C: I know…<slightly condescending smile> Do you remember that my boat rolled through three hundred and sixty degrees off New Zealand?

STUDENT: That was about the most incredible thing I’d ever heard of - a sixty foot boat rolling upside down and then rolling back up the other way.

C: That was quite an experience, too. The galley was a mess afterwards.

STUDENT: A lot of things happened that slowed you down from your goal.

C: That is what exploration is.

STUDENT: What is what exploration is?

C: My thought is that it is going forward while feeling very confused and uncertain as to where you are, where you’re actually going forward to, and whether you have the resources to sustain you. You feel at best only partially in control of the situation and frequently not at all in control.

STUDENT: But you did achieve most of your goals. Didn’t you hit Australia within ten miles or so of what you were aiming for after being out of sight of land for two months?

C: There is nothing extraordinary in that. Do you think I simply sailed the original course I set when I rounded Africa? If I’d done that and hit my destination within ten miles, it would have been extraordinary!

STUDENT: Well, what did you do?

C: Corrected course every day – at least, every day that I could see the sun or the stars.

STUDENT: All this isn’t really telling me what I want to know.

C: That’s because you still have not considered what it is to be an explorer who is constantly correcting course.

STUDENT: I wanted to ask you, though, why do you call yourself an explorer when you sail over courses that many others have sailed before?

C: Because I was exploring.

STUDENT: Aren’t you stretching the meaning of the word explorer a little when the goals you’re seeking, the places you’re trying to get to, have already been discovered by others? For instance, you knew what course to set for Western Australia when you rounded Africa.

C: Yes, I knew Western Australia was on that course.

STUDENT: Well, then, you’re not really exploring. You decide what port you’re going to sail to and then you sail there. But I don’t know what port I’m trying to sail to. I don’t even know if there are any ports in the direction I’m going. That’s the situation I’m in, and you can sit there puffing on your pipe and smiling at me if you want to, but you’ve already done your heroic deeds. I’m the one hurting!!

C: (((( You’ve gotten it! )))

STUDENT: What have I got?

C: You have gotten what it means to be an explorer.

STUDENT: Well, I don’t like it, I can tell you – whatever it is that I’ve got.

C: Then give it up.

STUDENT: I can’t. We’re past the Add/Drop period.

C: That must be what we call in voyaging the point of no return. < sneer >

STUDENT: I wouldn’t give it up anyway. That would be quitting. I’m committed in my mind to learning something.

C: Well, that’s another part of what it means to be an explorer. The point of no return is not a place on a globe or a calendar: it’s a place in the mind. I once reached a port after a thirty day passage to find it engulfed in a typhoon, with towering waves making any close approach certain disaster and a howling onshore wind driving me straight at it at maximum hull speed. What was my goal?

STUDENT: To get to the port?

C: To attempt to get into the port would have resulted in the certain destruction of my boat and my probable drowning. What was my goal?

STUDENT: To avoid your goal?

C: Just so.

STUDENT: What happened?

C: I don’t know. I was delirious with fever at the time. When next I became fully conscious, I was twenty miles away from the port. I don’t know how I got there. It is even possible that there never was a storm, and I never did attempt an approach. But all this, too, is part of what it is to be an explorer.

STUDENT: I’m getting confused. Your goal was the port?

C: Yes.

STUDENT: You were clear about that?

C: Yes.

STUDENT: You’d been pursuing this goal for many days. All your navigating and your sailing skill and so on were aimed at attaining that goal?

C: Yeeees.

STUDENT: But that’s precisely the situation I’m not in. I don’t know what resources to organize in what way to reach the end. I don’t have a “port.”

C: Let me try to say this in a way that will convey my feeling as an explorer. I did not have the port the way you insist that I had it along the way. What I had was a going-forward-toward. That going-forward-toward was a good deal more general than you imagine. It is the non-explorers who rather naively assume that one they have a clear sharp picture in mind of where they are going, they can trust that picture through to the end. To be an explorer is to not know where, precisely and concretely, one is going.

STUDENT: < exasperated > Going-forward-toward. Beats me.

C: When you go through your dark living room on the way to the kitchen at 3 A.M., do you simply stride confidently across the floor?

STUDENT: Not unless I want to fall over the dog or crunch a toe on the coffee table.

C: What is your mind doing as you cross the room?

STUDENT: Feeling for the dog and the corner of the table.

C: Somewhat tentatively?

STUDENT: Yes.

C: Where is the kitchen, in your mind?

STUDENT: In my mind, it’s…it’s there but it’s…

C: Somewhat subordinate to the more immediate concerns of the dog and the coffee table?

STUDENT: Yes, I guess so.

C: If you smelled a strong feces smell as you entered the darkened room, what would you do?

STUDENT: I would turn on the light.

C: For the obvious reason.

STUDENT: For the obvious reason.

C: The dog and the coffee table in turn become subordinate to yet a more immediate concern?

STUDENT: Yes. But I’m still trying to get to the kitchen.

C: Yes, you are still trying to get to the kitchen. You are going-forward-toward it. That is precisely the way a “port” is for me, right up to the point that I actually alight on the wharf. Meanwhile, along the way, as you say, a host of more immediate concerns occupy me, concerns with which I deal as best I can, sometimes neatly, but more often with the most precarious feeling of makeshift. That is what it is to be an explorer.

STUDENT [Pause]: Say, do you know Sir Edmund Hillary, the mountaineer and explorer?

CHICHESTER: Yes

STUDENT: Could you put me in touch with him? I'm starting to feet that something like mountain climbing might give me a way to understand how to set and reach goals.

CHICHESTER <Wearily>: Possibly so.

END