Travelling Downstream on Life's River

I spend a lot of time outside doing just about every outdoor sport that I can. Trail running, skiing, climbing, backpacking, rafting, biking, kayaking… you get the idea. I love the outdoors and being able to experience it in as many ways possible.

Through the years I have slowly picked up these skills thanks to the inspiration and help from many extremely skilled people that I have met along the way. My parents taught me how to camp. I learned how to trad climb from my neighbor's older brother. I learned how to kayak from my best friend. The people I met in these communities inspired me to try my hardest and become skilled in various fields so that one day I could be like them. Along the way though, there were many situations that could have ended my, or a friend’s, outdoor career. These situations are what taught me what I consider to be one of the most important skills in life: staying calm in stressful situations.

Last year I was kayaking in Tennessee with a few friends that I met through the kayak club here at CU. One of us flipped, and dislocated his shoulder (let’s call him Ahab). Ahab was obviously in a lot of pain and was not having a good time. One of the first people on the scene (let’s call them Billy), who had minimal first aid training began to panic, telling Ahab how terrible his shoulder was and focusing on the worst case scenarios. With these new ideas in his head, Ahab began to panic even more.

The first thing I did when I got on the scene was remove Billy.  Ahab quickly calmed down and we soon were able to move him to a car and to the hospital. He was out of commission for the rest of the trip, but his spirits were not dampened. Remember, in stressful times there can often be a Billy (either a person or some other stress factor) that makes the situation 10x worse. Remove these factors from your life and you will almost immediately be in a better situation.

Freshman year of college some friends and I planned a trip to go ski in Japan (none of us spoke any Japanese). It was, to this day, one of the best experiences in my life. However this trip also had a major mishap. One of my buddies (again let’s call him Ahab) took what seemed to be a small fall while we were skiing. I look over at him to see that he is seizing, face down in the snow. I quickly skied over to him to find that he was gurgling blood and completely unresponsive. Not a super fun thing to see... Another friend immediately went to get ski patrol, while those of us with medical training immediately went to work.

When ski patrol showed up, they took one look at what we had done to stabilize our buddy and immediately thanked us for doing their job for them. They took him to the base in a meat sled and he was soon back on his feet, smiling like usual. We had to drive him to the ER to get a few stitches (he cut his mouth on his ski Joker style). My big takeaway from this was that no matter how bad a situation seems, if you focus on the things that you can fix and control, things will work out. Focusing on the things you can't control is pointless and makes things worse. 

There will always be good times and bad times. The important thing in life is to stay calm, no matter how bad a situation may seem. Life is a lot like a river. It always keeps moving along, whether or not you want it to, and always keeps taking you new places. Sometimes you get caught in an eddy or have a nasty swim, but eventually you keep going down. Right now amidst these strange times, it feels like we're stuck in one of those eddies, but in time we will continue on. Travelling downstream rarely goes exactly as planned. That’s the best part. The adventures we go on that don’t go to plan teach us the most, we just have to find those lessons.