Since I made the decision to put together a year of more or less continuous cruising, I have been grappling with the workload I have gotten myself in for. I knew I was going to have to plan carefully and be very disciplined to Be ready, and so far I am finishing up 2017 beautifully on track. I am now up to eighty lectures in the six years I have had cruise assignments to prepare for. Hardly seems possible—I must really love doing the work (answer:yes, I do).
My goal ( actually my need) was to be ready for all of 2018 by the end of 2017, so in the last two months I have been working on lectures I won’t actually give until next fall. Today I put to bed the last one. It can slumber peacefully until I am ready to take another look, at which point I will see the weaknesses better than I can now, and will clarify, liven up and otherwise improve good lectures into what I hope will be excellent ones.
Like so many things, what one sees from the outside (Cruising! World Travel!) is the reward for what is not seen— the equivalent of the years of hard work that only shows to the public in the museum, or on the field of play. So yes, my cruising life is a lot of fun, but also an astronomical amount of unseen “fun work.”
Now I will get a jump start on 2019 before January 6, when I get one of my payoffs— the first leg of the Silversea World Cruise (Los Angeles to Hawaii to Tahiti). Aloha!