“Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer”, said Machiavelli. Which may be another way of saying that by keeping people close, we can defeat the enemy in them.

It’s a tricky business navigating to cross a bay full of rocks and shoals in thick fog, when we can’t see more than 200 feet. The rocky enemies are many, scattered and unseen. In a modern motorboat with electronic navigation we can stay clear of the dangers by setting a course from one safe landmark such as a navigation buoy to another, and then traveling quickly over open water with the electronic magic boxes telling us when we’re off course and when the next safe mark is approaching.

In the traditional wooden expedition boats of the Nova Scotia Sea School that doesn’t work. We don’t have electronics, or even electricity. We navigate the old fashioned way, with a compass, a chart, and a lead line to drop down and feel the bottom when the water’s shallow. Our safe passage is entirely up to us. The boats have no engine, just sails and oars, so moving quickly isn’t an option. That means it takes us a long time to get from one buoy to the next, so any steering errors are amplified. The crew is made up of young trainees, many of whom have never been in a boat before. Getting one of them to steer a straight course over open water even a short distance is very unlikely. The next buoy is a small thing in a big body of water, and with 200 feet of visibility we’d have to hit it right on, and that’s just not going to happen.

So we transform our enemies into guides. There are a lot more of them than buoys. We head for a nearby rocky outcropping that will have waves breaking on it, waves that could break us to splinters if we let them. But the waves also make a lot of noise, and we’ll hear them before we wreck. In fact, we want to be sure to pass close enough to the rocks to hear those waves, because that tells us where we are.

From there, we head for another shoal where we know the seagulls gather to feed. We’ll hear their cries, and know where we are again. From there, we head for an island that has more nasty rocks off its shore but that is big enough to have a stand of pine trees. When we smell that dry, woodsy land smell on the breeze we know the island is close upwind of us, and it’s time to turn toward the high cliffs of the next island on our route. The water is deep right up to these cliffs. If we were traveling at high speed we would have no hint from a depth sounder that land was near, and the fog would reveal the cliffs too late to slow down. At our slow speed we know we’ll be able to turn as soon as we see the cliffs, and then we can follow them in deep water until they drop down to the entrance to the cove where we plan to anchor.

When we move too fast, the cliffs are our enemy, When we move slowly and carefully, we get close enough for the same cliffs to become our guide.

We can not defeat the rocks and cliffs, or the metaphorical rocks and shoals of difficult people in our work and life ashore. In a direct confrontation they may defeat us. But we can defeat the enemy in people by knowing how to get close enough to work with them. We don’t get so close that we trigger their destructiveness. We get close enough to make a relationship with what is useful about them, to learn what they have to teach us about where we are in the world, and how we can move forward. Without our enemies, we’d be lost.