“Captain, the hub is worried and very agitated about the quarantine they imposed on us at the port. Can you talk to us?”
“What troubles you, boy? Don’t you have enough food? Don’t you sleep enough?”
“This is not it, Captain, I can’t stand not being able to go ashore, not being able to embrace my loved ones.”
“And if they let you down and you were contagious, would you bear the guilt of infecting someone who can’t stand the disease?”
“I would never forgive myself, even if this plague was invented for me!”
“Maybe it is, but if it doesn’t?”
“I understand what you mean, but I feel deprived of freedom, Captain, they have deprived me of something.”
“And you deprive yourself of even more things, boy.”
“You are making fun of me?”
“Not at all … If you let yourself be deprived of something without responding adequately, you have lost”.
“So, in your opinion, if they take something from me, do I have to take other ones off to win?”
“Sure. I did it in the quarantine of seven years ago.”
“And what did you deprive yourself of?”
“I had to wait more than twenty days on the ship. I had been waiting for months to enjoy the port and enjoy some spring on land. There was an epidemic. In Port April they forbade us to go down. The first days were hard. I felt like you. Then I started to respond to those impositions by not using logic. I knew that after twenty-one days of behavior a habit is created, and instead of complaining and creating terrible ones, I started behaving differently from all the others. I began to reflect on who, in deprivation, has many and for all the days of his miserable life, to get in the right perspective, then I worked to win.
I started with food. I forced myself to eat half of what I normally ate, then I began to select more easily digestible foods, which would not overload my body. I went to feed on foods that, traditionally, contributed to keeping man healthy.
The next step was to combine this with a purification of unhealthy thoughts, to have them ever higher and nobler. I forced myself to read at least one page a day of a book on a topic I didn’t know. I forced myself to do physical exercises on the bridge at dawn. An old Indian had told me years ago that the body is empowered by holding its breath. I forced myself to take deep breaths every morning. I believe my lungs never reached such a force. The evening was the time for prayers, the time to thank some entity that rules everything, for not giving me the fate of having serious hardships for my whole life.
Always the Indian advised me, years before, to get into the habit of imagining light entering me and making me stronger. It could also work for loved ones who were far away from me, and so this practice also made an appearance on every day I spent on the ship.
Instead of thinking about everything I couldn’t do, I thought about what I would do once I got off. I saw the scenes every day, lived them intensely and enjoyed the wait. Everything you can get right away is never interesting. Waiting serves to sublimate desire, to make it more powerful.
I had deprived myself of succulent foods, of many bottles of rum, of blasphemies and curses to be listed in front of the rest of the crew. I had deprived myself of playing cards, of sleeping a lot, of lazing around, of thinking only of what they were depriving me of. “
“How did it end, Captain?”
“I acquired all those new habits, boy. They made me get off after much longer than I expected.”
“Did they also deprive you of spring, anyway?”
“Yes, that year they deprived me of spring, and of many other things, but I had nevertheless flourished, I had brought spring inside, and no one could have stolen it anymore”.