This was going to be a listicle but it turned to be a long stream of consciousness with a helping of listicle.

July 30, 2026 rowing

I was bow seat again for some unbeknownst reason, but I surprisingly enjoyed it this time.

Lessons I've enjoyed learning:

My seatmates and I are a team.
How to yell clear instructions: Focus on brevity and what to do. Avoid giving instructions of what not to do.
Every single person in the boat is critical. See #1.
Insecurities and egos are left behind and replaced with 'the boat' as a single entity. See #1.
Keep showing up to get better. Some days might be worse than others, but just keep showing up!
Move onto the next stroke. Don't dwell on mistakes.
Most people don't know what they're doing from time to time. But again, see #1. We figure it out together.
It's a powerful feeling to have everyone in perfect unison where all oars click into place at the same time. A shiver me timbers, surreal feeling where I embody becoming apart of a greater sum. It's only happened for one stroke for me, i.e. once in a real blue moon, but it's a feeling I want to keep achieving.
Help others, ask when I don't know the answers, and have patience with newer rowers. It's nice to remind each other we're all learning together.
Rowing's fun. There're seals! Today I saw a fox on the shore too.
Bowing is fun. It strains my brain but lately it's a fun challenge to get accustomed to figuring out how to communicate with varying personalities and skill levels to get the boat to go in the right direction.
Bowing strains my brain, but it's been getting more enjoyable.
I love how much more there always is to learn.
The boat's sensitive to any movement. Keep my eyes on the horizon.
Stay loose and row long.
Keep rowing while instructions are being given. Can't steer without movement.
Steering is hard. How do you keep a boat straight??

I love how much there is to learn and do. There's lots to experiment and experience that it tickles my brain.

All the lessons I learn rowing also apply to outside the boat. Rowing has really forced me out of my comfort zone. I have to yell for my seatmates to hear my instructions. I've had to yell loudly and wrongly. I've learned to yell louder when questioned. I've yelled loudly, repetitively, and with wrong instructions. These three things independently terrify me and altogether represent my worst nightmare.

I have tendencies to double check, qualify and hedge my observations and knowledge with "I think," "Maybe," "Possibly," etc., because I hate being wrong. I have a tendency to over-apologize or over-explain any degree of incorrectness.

There's no room for insecurity when rowing. It's a waste of time to dwell. The only thing that matters is to keep rowing.

I've learned to save my brain capacity to direct the boat and focus on the next stroke. I've learned to save my apologies for the docks and dive into what to do next,

"Stern pair, sitting ready at the finish! Full body rowing, and ROW."

A benefit of having stern pair row while bow pair sets the boat is it reduces the concurrent threads the bow needs to row, navigate, and give directions to the latter two. Today was fun because I realized this helped reduce the mental workload significantly for me to recharge enough and set the boat correctly before switching back to row as apart of the bow pair.

Every stroke and instruction I've given has forced me to let go and move forward for the safety of the boat and those in/around it. I think rowing's been so life changing for me because it's the perfect combination of all things I'm addicted to: teamwork, trust, technical challenges, constant improvement through action, forced focus and presence to the situation in front of me, being outside; just figuring things out around a supportive team. The feeling of being apart of something greater than me when I'm not religious or all that spiritual is addicting.

I've learned to love how much information my brain takes in and processes. The habit that continues to optimize and process multiple threads at a time is receiving practice to resolve priorities more accurately and to higher precision. I've learned to process lower priority queues on the water, and anything forgotten will most likely be re-discovered at another time and most likely is not important to figure out.

My brain kept running into stack overflow issues when I first started rowing. Every thread kept trying to claim higher priority and result in a constant deadlock. This translated to spinning the opposite direction, running into other boats/shore/bridges, or just drifting towards other boats/the shore/bridges in real life.

Failing so often in the past two months has superceded the joy I have learning about and being challenged by the sport. I don't think I've had an experience to be so sucky at something, or to be on such a technical and team-dependent sport. It's like the optimal point of difficulty and frustration to induce learning. With a degree of tenacity and willingness to try. Highly recommend.