I've come to the conclusion...

I've come to the conclusion that lessons are everywhere.  We all know that mistakes teach us things.  Every single one of them.  We touch a hot burner and we learn to- not touch the hot burner.  Those are easy- you don't need me to write an entire blog post about learning lessons from our mistakes.  I think something we often forget is that there are lessons elsewhere.  When we accomplish something we pat ourselves a job well done and move on.  Few people reflect on the accomplishment and figure out what went right.  That's lesson #1 from me today.  Also! According to David Foster Wallace here we can find lessons in the mundane-ness of life.. it's just up to us to show up and pay attention.  I highly suggest that you take the 22 minutes to listen to that David Foster Wallace YouTube video when you get the chance, it'll change your life.  Here's the link again, just in case :)
This post isn't really about finding lessons in mistakes, successes, or the mundane-ness of life.  What it's really about is finding lessons in my favorite place to find them: action sports, and how they can relate to our everyday life.

Commitment issues:
As I get better at climbing, I'm finding myself on more difficult routes.  What makes one climbing route more difficult than another can be as simple as the distance between hand holds.  For the holds that are just out of reach, the talent is in your ability to shift your body position and, more importantly- your commitment to the move. Instead of just standing up on one leg and reaching for the hold, you have to actively push, fully extending your opposite leg and watch your hand grab the hold.  It's almost like jumping to the next hold (which some people actually do.. I'm not there, yet) Especially with bouldering though, full extension of a limb can be scary. If your hand doesn't make it to the hold- you're falling off the wall.  Fear of commitment to a move.  Or a line.  Or to another person comes from us needing to have an out. If we don't commit fully, if we don't put in everything we have, every ounce of effort we could possibly put forward.. we can avoid the grueling pain of potential failure. If we miss the climbing hold, or crash on our decent, or get our hearts broken, it was because of our lack of commitment- not because we weren't good enough. Our brains are hard wired for loss aversion.. so much so that we miss the opportunity for pleasure because of it. Our instincts tell us that potential pain from loss out weighs potential pleasure from gain.  So we hold back.  We don't push off that leg.  We don't get aggressive on a steep decent.  We don't give ourselves over completely to another person. We get scared to fully commit to the move.  And what's funny is, this lack of commitment is usually what ends up destroying us in the end.  If we can muster up the courage, which Brene Brown doesn't define as bravery, but instead as 'speaking from the heart', to push off with everything we have and reach for that hold, we are more likely to get it.  And you know what, if we don't at least we can walk away with a sense of full effort.

Gripping to tightly:
When we get scared our natural impulse is to hold on tighter. To our handlebars, to the climbing wall, to the people that we think are leaving us. The only thing that we ever get from this, though, is fatigue. Hands turn into claws that need to be peeled from handlebars, forearms get so pumped full of blood that fingers fall off the wall, and your broken heart ends up hurting even more than if you had just let them walk out in the first place.  We fatigue our bodies and minds by holding on too tightly to the things that we think we can't live without. What's funny though, is that you can absorb high impact for longer with a loose grip, have fewer falls from the rock by treating your holds like eggshells, and improve the quality of people you surround yourself with by letting those who are not serving you walk out.  When I notice that I'm over gripping on the wall, I pause and sit back.  I rely on my harness and belyer to hold me up while I release the bad energy from my forearms and let them rest.  When I notice it on my bike and I come into an easier section, I lift my pinkies off the bars.  When I notice that I'm holding too tightly to people in my life I ask myself are the people and things that you surround yourself with actively improving your experience? If not, let them go and say 'see you another time'- commonly the over gripping is what is driving them away in the first place.  So grasp lightly on your climbing holds, let go of your pinkies when you're riding through the easy stuff, and cherish the meaningful relationships in your life.

Search mode and send mode:
On avalanche beacons there are two different modes: search mode and send mode. Send mode we use for the times that we are skiing and search mode comes in when someone gets caught up in an avalanche and we need to find them. Scary right? We find a similar concept on mountain biking shocks: they're open for flying downhill and locked out when you are climbing up.  Not as scary as search mode, but locking out your shocks means that the fun is over and it's time to work again. Locking out your shocks and putting your beacon into search mode can seem daunting, even scary but they are necessary to a balanced and fulfilled adventure (read; life). If we spend our entire lives in send mode, flying down the hill as fast as we can, we never have time to stop and get the work done. Our lives become a 'plug and play' and we spend the entirety of it just barely in control. Don't forget to stop every so often, flip into search, lock out your shocks, and collect some information about yourself. 

Overcorrection:

When we do make a mistake our natural instinct is to correct in the opposite direction.  When our car skids we turn the wheel the opposite direction, when you end up off balance on your bike you shift your weight to stay upright, when you narrowly miss a tree while skiing through the glades you react quickly to avoid the next one.  Correction is fine.  Necessary even.  If we OVER correct, however, we end up imbalanced in the other direction and fall any way. Sometimes we use this over correction as a way to punish ourselves for our initial mistake. Eating a pint of ice cream in a single sitting means we're only eating salad for the next 2 weeks and going to the gym every day.  Dating someone who is emotionally unavailable is over corrected to someone who is wayyy to available. Stand to long at the top of a biking aspect and talk yourself into the fear of it.  Try it anyway, and end up on your face.

It's best to avoid correction in the first place, so I'm working on learning the difference between fear and danger. Turn toward fear and away from danger.  Fear may require a correction, danger will almost always result in over correction.  Be assertive with the course that you are going to take, the things that you need, and accept that you've made a mistake when you do. Mistakes are what makes you human, learn from them and course correct from there.

Trusting your body
Trusting your body and mind to make the right decisions for you in time of panic or crisis is SO hard.  But, I also think, at least for me, so essential.  Growing up I learned very quickly how to suppress my own self trust and for a while.. that worked for me.  When I would come across a problem on the mountain bike trail that I didn't trust I could handle I would slam on the brakes.  This actually put me into bigger trouble more often than not.  No bike is ever going to land correctly and no biker is going to be safe when the wheels are stuck in place.  Chances are, you're going over the handle bars and landing flat on your face.  Instead I've been actively trusting that my body knows what to do on the trails, and crossing that over, that my mind knows what to do with my decisions.  Not every aspect of the trail HAS to go perfectly- today my ride was far from perfect.  But, (and this is an ultimate career goal of mine) by trusting our bodies to take us where it needs to go and tell us what it needs to tell us, we can switch the necessity of taking care of it into a desire. For me- trusting that I've put in enough hours on the bike and that my intuition is going to tell me what line to take, erases SOME of the fear associated with throwing myself down a mountainside at the fastest possible speed I can. Building that trust in my body has also enhanced the trust that I have in my mind and the decisions that I'm making. Yes, I do want to eat mostly vegetables and continue to ride my bike until I'm 110. Yes, the friends that I surround myself with are meaningful. Yes, the career field I've chosen is important. 

When something happens and we break the trust we have with our bodies (trauma, aging, injury, illness) that mistrust is where the questions in our mind come from. Should I take this job or that? Is this the right person for me? Are my friends well intentioned? AM I CAPABLE? Capable of lifting this weight? Biking that line? Climbing that route? Cooking that dinner? Providing for myself and my family?

By slowing down, being patient with our wants and needs, committing to things that scare us, and trusting ourselves to handle it- we increase the trust we have with both our minds and bodies.  And I think that's an important life lesson.

Hi everyone, my name is Lisa. And I'm addicted to being outside.

Hi everyone, my name is Lisa.  And I'm addicted to being outside.

I need to be outside.  Like, NEED to.  Most days after work I find myself either down by a fishing hole on the Winooski river or wandering the trails of various systems close by.  Why?  Well why does an alcoholic drink?  According to Psychology Today 'it provides existential relief'.  For me, going in the woods or standing by a river allows me to feel calm.  In a world that's as fast paced and technology driven as ours, I love the idea that there are still parts of the world where the only things you can hear are the birds, or where you're cell phone doesn't work, or the fact that there's a place that can only be reached by using your own body.  Unlike alcohol and other drugs, I don't think my addiction of being outside has negatively impacted those in my life (if it has, let me know) but I still think it's important to share.
I'd also like to share the reasons why I love being outside so much.  The woods create an even playing field.  Sure, maybe some people in the group have more efficient gear, or better shoes, or a faster bike, but the reality is- if you want to be safe, you're going to move at the pace of the slowest person.  And when it comes down to it, you're going to reach your destination when you reach it.  And it will be as beautiful as it is supposed to be for you.  AND!  It probably won't be as beautiful in a photograph as it was in person, so you better enjoy the crap out of it in the moment.  (How cool is that?)
I LOVE how strongly you need to listen to your intuition when you're outside.  Call it hippie mumbo jumbo but I feel strongly that people's (maybe just mine?) intuition gets muted by the over stimulating world, and when they in the woods the pipeline gets power washed of all the Facebook, current event news, social normaties, sludge that slows down the communication between intuition and conscious thought.  This is one of the reason's why I think people feel more comfortable opening up, tell the truth, and feel more connected to each other in the woods.

My road to addiction, I think, had 2 major on ramps.  The first was the insistence my parents had on backpacking the Northville-Placid Trail with my brother and I when we were young. And the second was the summer I spent as a lifeguard at a residential Girl Scout camp in the Adirondacks.  I've had other various, bear attack, helicopter skiing, 14er climbing related occasions that have amplified my life outside, but the 2 that I'm going to share really solidified it.

Northville-Placid Trail
When I was 10 years old, my parents decided it would be a good idea to put everything that my family needed on our backs and live in the woods for 5 days.  They did that with their vacation time... I'm not entirely sure where they got the idea from- I know my dad had pretty profound summer camp experiences and they took a backpacking trip together in their 20s, but either way- when I think about the vacation time that adults rarely have anyway, I can't believe they chose to spend it walking 30 miles with 2 snot nose little kids.  The Northville-Placid Trail is about 136 miles in length and unlike the 3 month, 2190 mile journey of the Appalachian Trail, the NPT takes experienced hikers about 10 days to finish end to end.  Again, since I was 10 and my parents are sane, we broke it up into sections and only finished off the last part a year or so ago.  The first section we did when I was, like I said, 10 years old.  I had no idea what a frame pack was, I had never eaten freeze dried foods, and my tent camping experience was minimal.  The first night we spent in the woods was exciting and new.  Making dinner, putting together a fire, and ignoring my bed time lit me up inside.  I was ready to take on the world.  Then, the second or third night we were out there I had a panic attack.  I remember hiking a pretty long distance that day and my short little legs had been weighed down by a bulky frame pack that I kept insisting my family members take things out of.  We got to our lean-to for the night and started making camp.  The Adirondack lean-tos are known for having journals in them that people can make entries in when they stop through.  Trail conditions, weather, general musings, and in our case a rowdy boy scout troop trying to scare 10 year old girls. "...rabid raccoon ate Jack" I remember it saying... and I LOST it.  Tears, panic, sweating- I had been dragged through the woods with no TV, carrying all of my fresh underwear for the week in a frame pack that didn't allow for my pig tails to properly bounce, and now I was going to be eaten by a raccoon.  NO WAY!  I was done.  This was my first experience with any sort of anxiety or panic which seems a little backwards to me now that I go to the woods to feel the opposite of that.. Anyway, my mom managed to calm me down that night by promising that if a rabid raccoon came into our tent she would volunteer herself first.  What a gal.  I don't know what happened in my brain after that, but I was hooked.  I had my struggles through the rest of the trip, sure, but something about the realization that I could face and overcome fears for the first time while I was sitting in the woods clicked with me.

Look at how happy that kid is to have lived in the woods for 5 days.  My brother on the other hand... was probably sick of me singing camp songs at the top of my lungs to keep the bears away.

Lake Clear Girl Scout Camp
I don't remember every year that I spent at camp (there were 9 of them, by the way) but I remember parts of the first.  And I remember the last.  I remember the first friend that I made at camp.  We were both 4th, going into 5th graders- which I think makes me the same age as when I did the NPT?  Maybe a year later?  Either way, I remember she was the only one in my group that I felt connected and safe with, but then she got really home sick and scared and ended up going home every night before bed.  I was homesick and scared too, but letters from my mom helped and the fact that she wasn't going to drive an hour each way every night just to pick me up and drop me off at camp REALLY helped motivate me to stay.  That was one of the first times in my life that I realized that when I'm faced with uncomfortableness I had 2 choices.  I could run away or I could stay and fight through it.  Interestingly, my first year at camp wasn't nearly as important to me as my final year.  I had gone through various experiences with camp- having all of our food eaten by bears, swimming across the lake at 5am, and ***.  But they were nothing compared to the things I learned about love and friendship from my final summer there.  I spent that summer as the camp lifeguard.  There were 4 of us on the waterfront staff and we were by far the best people there.  Among the lifeguard staff was one a counselor that I had looked up to as a camper who had an already established friendship with the then arts and crafts director.  Together the 3 of us existed in Girl Scout Camp world, where we only referred to each other by camp names, and our jobs were to be entertaining.  We started off that summer getting in trouble during staff orientation week and it was all downhill from there.  The rest of the summer included shenanigans like finding and playing with pet turtles, washing our hair in the lake that we also peed in, participating in jello and french toast eating contests, wrestling for greased watermelons, and sneaking into the kitchen or off camp property for snacks (when the substances we were on called for it).  We did almost lose our jobs a few times that summer, but it was all in the name of the development of our secret society.  Secret society?  Yeah- our secret society.  The secret has gotten out over the past few years so I don't feel guilty laying it out here.  Since one of the founding members of our society was the arts and crafts director, she got to choose which projects the girls did.  One of those projects was something we called wish boats.  The girls would scour around camp picking up pieces of bark, little sticks, leaves, and pine cones, or whatever suited their fancy, and form them into boats.  They would then come up with a wish, write it down and hot glue the wish along with a candle to the boat.  During the last night of camp we would have a camp fire and those that made wish boats would be able to release them into the lake with the candle lit.  We would tell the little girls that if the boat was gone in the morning, their wish would come true! Unnnnnfortunately for them... hot glue, paper, and candles litter the lake, so after all the girls went to bed we would have to canoe around and collect all of the boats.  This task was more or less doable depending on the various focus and thunder and lightening circumstances that we had.  But, no matter what, we pretty much got it done.  We would then throw out the boats and bring the wishes to the fort that we built in the woods and read them out loud.  Some of them were happy (I wish to go to a Hannah Montana concert), some of the were really inappropriate (I wish to get laid in the 9th grade), and some of them were really sad (I wish my grandma was still alive).  And even though we would never figure out who wrote what wish, we kept them all.  They're still safe in a scrapbook now 10 years later.

I ultimately learned most of the most important life lessons about friendship, love, and unconditional wishing in the woods, so for that- I owe a canoe full of gratitude.