“DEAD RECKONING”: FINDING ONE’S WAY AMID LIFE’S CHALLENGES

​In order to live and thrive while grieving for the deaths of my son, father, stepfather, and friends, I have to reckon with death: How do these people’s deaths affect my ability to navigate through the social world? How do their deaths change my relation to life, generally? Is death really an end, or is it more like a threshold that opens onto a new beginning? By asking these philosophical questions, I feel that I am arranging the deaths of my family members into an order, one that acts like a trail capable of leading me in a specific direction. Here, the histories of the word “reckon” come into view: “to explain, relate, recount, arrange in order” as well as “to settle accounts.” Dead reckoning is a helpful term to know when facing life’s ultimate limit.
The term, however, is more common in the world of nautical navigation. Historically, sailors would determine their current position by calculating their previous position (such as port of embarkation) and their ships’ speed over a specific duration. With the knowledge of their current location, sailors could then adjust their heading and navigate around known obstacles. The process of finding one’s location at sea was called dead reckoning.

As a philosopher, I’m drawn to the function of the “present position” in this nautical wayfinding practice. Sailors and grievers alike need to understand their present place in order to know where they’re going. But knowledge of “where one is” comes about only after making some analytical/mathematical calculations. We can’t know where we are unless we know where we’ve been and where we want to go. On the sea, past and future position is a matter of course; on the open seas of grief, by distinction, past and future locations aren’t so easy to ascertain, and thus knowledge of “where one is” in the world requires more intuitive calculations. Applied to the more philosophical kind of wayfinding, dead reckoning becomes a useful but extraordinarily difficult process for healing.
In this task of healing, we come upon a specific dimension of the word “dead”: “of water, ‘still, standing,’ from Proto-Germanic *daudaz.” Grief drops us in the still waters of the deep ocean of the soul. Without wind or current, these waters keep us in place and force us to comprehend the depth and expanse of the waters in which we are floating. I think of this dead water as the doldrums, a word that surfaces in Book IV of Homer’s Odyssey and refers to windless ocean travel, the worst kind of situation for a sailor trying to make his way home. The only way to summon the wind is to make an offering to the right spirit (Proteus) and/or god (Poseidon). Without faith in such spirits, people are left to float until chance intervenes. Even with faith and certainty in the spirit world, helping hands from beyond arrive on their own schedule, and waiting for help can be just as painful as the original traumatic experience that left us stranded in the first place.
But in that still water where no wind blows, an opportunity also presents itself. It is there that we have cause to think and talk to ourselves. The gnawing boredom we feel during the incessant waiting amid grief actually sparks the imagination and forces a necessary encounter with the self. Nietzsche referred to this “boredom” as “that disagreeable ‘lull’ of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds.” It is a disposition common among artists who actually need this boredom brought on by still waters in order to ruminate, connive, and create. Most importantly, the doldrums bring about a stillness of soul that helps us individually to reckon with ourselves, as if to say, “Ok. Fine. What is this all about then? What am I doing here? What is here?”