Awareness
Week
Becoming totally aware by becoming totally oblivious…
During one of New England's typically bitter winters and in the course of his arduous studies at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, Morgan Collins had an epiphany. It became quite clear to him (it has never been determined under what influence he might have been) that the only way one can become totally aware is to become totally oblivious. This paradox was put to the test that winter when in January 1986, as the New England Patriots prepared to compete in the Super Bowl, Morgan and a legion of his friends set off for a weekend at The Pond House, a family cottage on Cape Cod. The weekend was a huge success as evidenced by the fact that we were so oblivious by Sunday that no one cared that the Patriots lost, lost big and lost big in the snow (at least on the TV we were watching it snowed!)
The event had been dubbed Awareness Weekend in the invitation and so Morgan's idea was unanimously adopted as the Awareness Doctrine. Weekends on the Cape became recurring affairs.
As it happens Morgan and most of the friends in attendance that fateful weekend are sailors and it was also around that time that sailing cruises began to be made to the Bahamas. These weeklong cruises were:
March 1988 ~ Bimini or Bust '88
March 1989 ~ Goombay '89: Green Turtles Like Rain
March 1990 ~ The Compleat Bimini 1990
and were soon recognized to have the same effects upon awareness as the weekends on the Cape. Therefore, in 1990 when an organization was chartered to provide these cruises, the organization was fittingly named Awareness Week.
Since then the following Awareness Week cruises to the Bahamas and Awareness Weekends on Cape Cod have occurred:
March 1991 ~ Awareness Week 1991
March 1994 ~ Awareness Week 1994: The Wedding Cruise
September 1999 ~ Awareness Weekend 1999
August 2000 ~ Awareness Weekend 2000
March 2001 ~ Awareness Week 2001: The Seven Year Itch
August 2001 ~ Awareness Weekend 2001