How hard could it be?
It was a very calm lake, and I’d been kayaking a few times before. Spending an afternoon with my family on glacier-fed Eklutna Lake in Alaska seemed like a great entry into our vacation portfolio.
Then the guide started giving her super casual safety presentation, and I suddenly wondered if I was down to my last hour of life.
To be fair, I’ve never used a sea kayak before. The pros make it look easy. To me, it seems poorly designed. (Unless you were designing something intended to drown someone, in that case, it’s perfect.) If you don’t know what it’s like to use a sea kayak, imagine an eight-foot-long wooden 2×4 floating in the water. Now imagine sitting on top of it and trying not to tip over. Maybe it’s just me, but if I’m looking for something to help me traverse the sea, I’d rather have something closer to a pontoon boat than a pine needle to float on.
Despite the barely existent waves on this lake, and even they felt like a tsunami threatening to flip me over. Kim and the kids got to use tandem kayaks, which the employee described as very stable and almost impossible to tip. The way she described mine made me feel like it was a foregone conclusion that I was going to drown or, best case scenario, have to be rescued by my children and towed back to shore with a raging case of hypothermia.
Now, I was the one who suggested this activity, so I couldn’t exactly be the one who put the kibosh on the excursion due to cowardice. So I put on a brave face and got in the boat. The guide pushed me out into the water, and I immediately felt like death was imminent. I like to think of myself as a fairly athletic individual, but I felt as awkward and unstable as an elephant trying to balance on a basketball.
Thankfully, she gave me a few tips: Don’t make any sudden movements. Try not to look behind you. Sit up straight and stay balanced.
In retrospect — spoiler alert: I didn’t die! — I realized that those tips are just as useful for life as they are for sea kayaking.
1. Don’t make any sudden movements. It’s not usually advisable to make sudden changes in life. Spontaneity is good, but best reserved for things of little consequence. Getting married, quitting a job, dropping out of school, or making an all-in investment with your life savings are not scenarios conducive to sudden movements. But we can be very tempted to make them when we’re in periods of desolation, like when we’re stressed out, weary, lonely, afraid, or depressed. Those are uncomfortable seasons, and we’d do anything to get relief, so it’s tempting to go for a quick fix. This can lead to our life being tipped upside down and disastrous long-term consequences.
2. Try not to look behind you. Sure enough, there were some moments when I tried turning around to see what the kids were up to, and I got pretty wobbly. It’s good to learn from the past, but there is a danger in spending too much time looking backward. Otherwise, our life can drift off course, and we can end up in a place we don’t want to be. It’s always better and more stable to look in the direction you want to go.
3. Sit up straight and stay balanced. Let’s be real: life balance is an impossible goal. Variables change too fast on any given day to maintain perfect equilibrium. But we’ve all experienced times when we’ve been leaning too far in one direction for too long. Like the season when Kim began to Wonderhunt, after feeling overwhelmed from being in constant caregiver mode. Of course, there are seasons of life in which certain responsibilities require an outsized amount of time and attention from us — like putting in overtime to finish a project at work or caring for a sick family member — but we must be on guard from staying in that mode for too long. Sleep in once in a while. Take a day off. Go for a long walk or spend an extra hour in prayer. Do whatever you can to restore some semblance of balance, or you’re facing a surefire recipe for an overturned life.
In the end, we spent a little over an hour out on the lake. I followed the guide’s tips as best as I could, and gradually felt my confidence grow (or at least my panic subside). We all returned to shore safe and dry.
Once I got the hang of things, I spent time on the water just floating, trying to soak in the beautiful scenery around me and savor the time with my family, taking mental snapshots of them as they glided into view. And this, too, is good advice for living.
Sometimes we get stuck focusing on staying alive, and we forget to savor the gift of life.
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