We were on the ride into work one morning and Kim was in her
usual morning trance scrolling through Facebook or Pinterest when she came
across this kayaking T-shirt. She
distracted me from my driving long enough to hold up her phone and show me the
picture. Now I can read a traffic sign
or license tag at 800 yards but everything on the phone is a blur at less than
12 inches so I just took a quick glance at the screen. All I could make out was the top line in big
white letters on a black shirt that said “I Kayak” and underneath was a
somewhat fuzzy outline of a kayaker running some rapids. Everything below the center mass was a hazy
mix of letters that I couldn’t focus on nor should I have been trying to do so
driving through the morning rush. Rather
than strain any longer or risk running into the idiot in front of me putting on
makeup I just told her to read it to me.
The bottom line was a few simple words that posed the questions “What is
your super power?”
Now kayakers don’t have super powers, regardless of the fact
that it does take some incredible skill sometimes to do some of the things we
do in a piece of plastic, wood or composite not much wider than the chair you
are probably sitting in right now. Some
of us like to push the envelope a little and take our craft through places and
conditions that would make the average person pucker their butt just thinking
about. The first kayak that Kim bought
me had a sticker on the inside that said “Not designed for use above Class II
rapids”. That didn’t stop me from taking
it on the New River down a quarter mile class III, although I spent about half
the distance with the boat way out ahead of me and my bottom scraping every
single rock as I slide helplessly down the ravine. It also didn’t stop me from hauling the boat
back up the mountain the following day to give it another run. After two disappointing attempts I decided
the manufacturer was right and it was time for another boat. That same boat wasn’t really designed for
long distance or open water either but I had a buddy paddle it on a 150 mile
trip one year. The following year he
made a four mile open water crossing in it during a nor-easter on the Outer
Banks. There were times on that trip I would look across
from my sea kayak and waves would completely block him from view but every now
and again he would pop up on a wave, head tucked down, paddle wind milling away
making just as good a speed as I was.
Skill, luck or stupidity as some might say but whatever it was we sure
had fun and we are better for the experience.
You can’t learn something or get better at something without pushing the
limits having both victories and defeats.
If we don’t fail sometimes we can never win. Failures are the stepping stones to success.
We didn’t live to paddle another day because of super
powers, we made it through because we weren’t afraid to get out of our comfort
zone from time to time and push the limits.
With any challenge in life you will never succeed if you back down every
time things get hard. That little
sticker inside the boat might say you can’t do something but you can’t always
take it at its word. Just because someone
says something can’t be done doesn’t mean that you can’t do it, it just means
they couldn’t do it!
In just over a month I will again embark on a
long and arduous journey. A journey that
some said couldn’t be done, because they themselves couldn’t do it. It hasn’t always sunshine and rainbows but we
are better for the experience. Some even
went through Hell, but they are back! No super powers needed, it is all about perseverance. 