When river canoeing, I find it beneficial to stay in the current. It keeps you from becoming stuck o
When river canoeing, I find it beneficial to stay in the current. It keeps you from becoming stuck on the shore and turns you before you hit the outside bank. It requires less paddling and less steering. . . All weekend I thought about how this is like life. Stay in the current, ‘go with the flow,’ don’t oversteer, and allow life to unfold more gracefully, with ease. . . Like the river, life is unpredictable. This weekend the first half of the trip (30km) was almost continuous rapids. There were so many rocks, often along the vends of the river. Sometimes we could avoid them, and sometimes we had to choose which to try to bump over. . . Bam! Scraaape … the canoe leans We lean our bodies to counter balance I watch the edge of the boat coming down, wondering how much water we will take on Splash! And immediately we look ahead, to the future, to see what we must next manoeuvre. . . Like life: obstacles, sharp turns, unexpected bumps and challenges. Sometimes you get to pick your poison, and sometimes you must take what you’ve been given. . . The scariest moment was in a series of rapids coming around a tight bend in the river. After bumping and banging along the rocks, we got pushed out to the undercut portion of a sandstone wall on the right side of the river. The canoe bumped once, twice, then corrected. . . I was looking ahead at two gigantic boulders straight ahead of us, less than 15 meters away. The current was pushing us fast straight towards them. . . We had two options: make the sharp turn left and attempt to vigorously paddle around them, or squeeeeze down a narrow corridor between the boulders and the sandstone wall on the right. . . Adrian shouted, “Right?!” I yelled back, “Left! Paddle! Hard and fast on your left!” . . I don’t know why I chose left. It was a lightning bolt of intuition that I trusted, blindly. . . Adrian didn’t hesitate, he had blind trust in me and began paddling as hard as he could on the left, while I did the same on the right. . . The same current that was hurdling us towards the rocks pushed us out and around them. . . Such is life. (at Milk River, Alberta) https://www.instagram.com/p/Byi20pYgESf/?igshid=1higg0eh34pnp -- source link