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and your internal awareness combined. Boat sense emerges from practice; you learn what rushing means, develop the feel of a heavy catch, and discover the right ratio of drive and recovery that establishes a balanced cadence.
    How do you develop boat sense about your own inner world? How do you discover what you need to see when it’s hidden, without a coach to guide you?
    One stroke at a time.
    It’s hard to discern the precise moment of the catch, the change in direction that pivots between the two extremes of the recovery and the drive, between indifference and head-over-heels, gotta-have-it determination, the instant that stirs the feeling that lies at the heart of any attraction.
    Like water in the curve of the oar’s blade, I was caught by my desire to row.
    But, at seventeen, a novice rower, and barely an adult, I lacked boat sense and personal sensibility. I knew rowing had caught my interest, but I couldn’t acknowledge my life was caught by my past. My attraction to rowing seemed like a non sequitur, a break in the continuity of my life story that I welcomed with open arms. To me, rowing was completely different from anything I’d ever done before, and that fact alone increased my desire.
    I’d already been on the run from my family story for over five years, determined to leave the details and influence of that saga forgotten on some far-off street corner. I thought rowing gave me another opportunity to distance myself, to swerve off the expected route and run in a new direction. Turns out, I was as ignorant of the deeper motivations propelling my attraction as I was clueless about the lingo of rowing.
    Sometimes you have to go backward to go forward. All rowers know that, as they sit backward facing the stern. Every single strokeis followed by a complete reversal of direction, a gliding return to the top of the slide against the boat’s forward motion. That’s the only way to prepare for another stroke.
    Here, too, there’s only one way to understand why my decision to start rowing made sense, and that’s to go backward. Just as the separate components of a rowing stroke are linked together, so was my choice to take up this grueling endeavor anchored to my past. My denial didn’t negate its influence.
    Whether or not my teenaged self knew it, rowing also offered me a route back to myself. My foray into the world of pencil-thin boats, rock-hard musculature, and near-divine requirements for endurance may have been an accident, but it provided rescue.
    I wasn’t supposed to be that sixteen-year-old girl standing by the Charles River, yearning for escape from my life, already sad and sorry enough to resemble a defeated grown-up. My life’s trajectory had veered off its initial arc, catching me unprepared, leaving me anxious and uncertain. I was too young to learn about the fragility of love and the pain of loss, but absorbed those lessons as they came nonetheless, without the benefit of gentle introduction or wise guidance.
    For the longest time, as far as I knew, our family was normal, happy, and healthy. Our family photos boasted the usual suspects: a father and a mother, with four kids entering the picture over the course of an action-packed six years. The second oldest, sandwiched between my two sisters, with my brother the caboose, I was a preadolescent living the high life on Park Avenue with no second thoughts. I knew we were lucky. I saw my share of beggars shaking their tin cups outside the Plaza Hotel on Central Park South. I knew everyone didn’t live in an Upper East Side penthouse apartment with elevator men and doormen opening doors and carrying packages, or go to a private school that taught its students to curtsey along with math and science, or spend summers out of town, away from the hard concrete and sodden heat of the city.
    Like any kid who knew only one way of life, I took my family and our circumstances for granted. But I knew the past