Launching Boats for difficult times It seems crazy to be thinking about boats at a time like this. Not just with winter closing in, but within this climate of growing uncertainty as the imminence of collapse emerges into our everyday lives. The old patterns don’t work, and whether we are upset by this, or inwardly glad to see cracks in the insanity; the result is still confusing and frightening to contemplate. It’s no longer just the theoretical fate of the world, but our own fates that begin to unbalance. The worse it gets, I find myself ever more drawn to a contemplation of boats. This could be simply my falling back on a soothing area of familiarity, or it could just be my particular delusion as I look for a way to avoid inconvenient, and increasingly uncomfortable, truths.