The hidden cost of following your intuition

Examining the small print of spiritual awakening, and how one year of sailing is teaching me that aliveness—not comfort—should be the yardstick.

I do my best to embody the happy-go-lucky, go with the flow, and appreciate the good in the unexpected but sometimes you just can’t run from the storm.

You can talk yourself up or you can talk yourself down. You can focus on all the parameters by which your life is a failure, or you can focus on all the incredible gifts your life has brought you.

This is the truth we often forget: life is rarely a series of blessings for any of us. It is a cacophony of experiences—some feel so warm, delightful, and exciting that they make us bubble and burst with energy and enthusiasm, others so heavy, challenging, and dark that they have us questioning whether it is worth it.

Life can be a challenge and it can be great—and most often it is both. Sometimes at the same time.

I know that my life has been one of polar opposites—of extremes. I’ve gotten to live some experiences that have baffled me with their uniqueness and beauty, but I’ve also been in the trenches. The last year, as I have sailed across the Atlantic, has been no exception.

There will be challenges

I have, first of all, had the opportunity to share the journey with an amazing bunch of human beings. We have tested each others patience, mirrored each other’s pain, laughed together, and cared for each other in our vulnerable moments.

I have also had a chance to explore the Atlantic region—its cultural history, worldviews, traditions, and people. I’ve sailed across three continents, visited fishing communities, slept in busy commercial ports and cruising hubs.

Perhaps our wildest mooring experience was the old fishing port of Essaouira in Morocco, in between small fishing boats, a centuries-old fortress, and the hustle of a fishery industry that never sleeps.

The scariest one was the concrete dock in the small town of Agaete in Gran Canaria, where I, halfway up a mountain, received a phone call from the port employees who warned me that five tons of sailboat were hanging from the mooring lines, as the tide had receded by a meter while the dock remained immobile. They cut the moorings for me, and Falkor was saved, but I was not aware until I had run a 10K trail down the mountain with visions of a destroyed sailboat and a cancelled journey running through my mind.

On the longest leg of our journey we were, for a moment, as close to complete failure and utter disaster as I have ever been on board Falkor, when the Furlex system for the genoa jammed, and our sail started to slam the spinnaker boom into our railings in 40-knot winds. It was one of those moments when you realise that nobody is coming to save you, that you are the one who has to take charge.

I managed, against all odds, to tuck the three-meter-long metal boom away—five meter swells crashing over the deck—and salvage the sail before it tore. We pulled it down from the stay by hand, and in through the front hatch, my bed soaked in seawater and sweat.

Afterwards, my knees felt like jelly, and the adrenaline rush completely depleted me of all of my energy. It was a moment of profound questioning: what the hell have I embarked upon? Are we in over our heads?

We had to sail the remaining seven days to Barbados with a reefed mainsail only, a new solar panel setup, and extra precautions due to the destroyed railings. But we made it. And after two months of shipping spare parts across the world—from Sweden to Martinique to Norway to Mexico—Falkor was finally mended and fixed.

I have also dealt with financial hurdles. That sailing is the most expensive way to travel for free is a poorly kept secret. But when my neighbours in the port of Barcelona congratulated me on chronic poverty for the rest of my life, after I had told them that I decided not to sell the boat, I didn’t believe them. Now I kinda do.

Indeed, sailing is a money pit. One misplaced bolt can easily signify more than a $1,000 repair. Now imagine a couple of those in a row, and you’ll quickly realise that it is not fuel, nor the travel costs, restaurant dinners or supplies that constitute the main costs of sailing.

Nah. It’s the boring stuff: the clogged toilet, water pumps, spare parts for the engine, navigation equipment, or faulty electrical wiring that will bust your pocket.

Speaking about the challenges I’ve faced on my journey in the last few months with a friend who’s a sailing content aficionado, he offered me some sobering words of wisdom: “Tomas, everybody who sails says the same—the challenges are beyond anything that they expected.” And that actually helped: I’m not doing it wrong.

And there will also be rewards

What has largely balanced the scales is the encounters and deep conversations with the common folks—the silent everyday champions—that we’ve run into in Barbados, the Dominican Republic, or Guatemala. The Jon and Jane Does that have shared their life wisdom with us.

Like the guy who waited for me on the beach in Cayman Island, where we anchored for two hours, to fill our fuel cans at the gas station.

I had battled my inner demons for the last few days, weeks, and heck, why not, months. But as we raced towards Cancun to be there in time for my flight back to Europe, the negative self talk had been extra. We had endured sweltering heat for a week, and the Caribbean had so far mostly provided tons of paperwork, marathon legs, and just a couple of hours on anchor on palm-clad beaches. I was questioning myself, my decisions, and the journey.

But as we stepped on land, an aged and slender Black guy hollered at me and asked for my name. He shook my hand, and without letting go, he started talking about the deeper meaning of life, the universal law of polarity, and the gifts of slow travel.

He had worked as a captain for twenty years in total: ten on a plane and ten on a ship. “What’s best?” I jokingly tried him. I was ready to ram my ship into a reef, cash the insurance money, and hop on a plane to Australia.

“When you fly you get to your destination much faster,” he said, stating the obvious. “But you miss all the stories that you gather when you travel along the surface of the earth. And at the end of life we realise that’s what we’re here for: to collect stories.”

I felt the tension that had accumulated in my chest release. “I think you’ve been sent by the universe to give me this message,” I told him. “This was exactly what I needed to hear right now.”

He looked me straight in the eyes, smiled, and said: “Yes, I often deliver messages on behalf of the universe. Here they call me Black Jesus.”

Okay Black Jesus, I thought to myself. I’m glad that we met.

Black Jesus on the beach in Cayman Island

Practicing faith in the process

In New Age spirituality and Jungian pop psychology, coincidences that feel like magic are called synchronicities. And we’ve had a lot of those this year. Yes—it might feel a little kooky to sail around the world convinced that you’re being guided by a higher power. But that’s what 2025 has felt like.

I’m doing something I’ve dreamed of but never thought I would do. Something that, at times, feels extremely scary and extremely challenging. I’ve given up on most comforts. I’ve emptied my emergency fund. I’ve pushed myself to share my vulnerabilities and reflections as openly as possible, and I have, again and again and again, tried as best I can to follow my intuition—the gut feeling—and not the sometimes scattered and chaotic mind that loves to talk me down.

I’m writing this not as a victorious conclusion but as a reminder from the tedious middle of a process that no matter where you are on your own life-journey—whether you feel stuck in an unsatisfying job, or worried that you might have made a wrong decision—you can, perhaps, find comfort in the idea that these challenges, the moments we feel like we’re moving in the wrong direction, that we messed up, or that we’re in way over our heads—these are the moments that constitute the richness of life.

So if you’re a normal human being who struggles at times, remind yourself that what now feels like an ordeal might just be the story you’ll look back on with compassion and pride at the end of your life, and say, “I fucking did it!”