My husband has a favorite analogy he often uses for parenting and in business. He says in kayaking, you communicate with other kayakers that there is an obstacle not by pointing at it, but by pointing towards the clear route. When someone points at something, what do you instinctively do? You look that direction. But in kayaking, where every second counts, you don’t have a second to spare. There’s only time to focus on the direction you want to go. Direct people the direction you want them to go, not where you don’t.
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I think this analogy applies in many ways to sobriety. As the old adage affirms, we are the sum of the five people we spend most of our time with, right? In recovery, we connect with a community of other people in sobriety, sometimes we find a sponsor or mentor, and we recommend books and accounts from people who are living healthy, sober lives. Who are riding the waves we want to be on.
It’s important to find people who can point you in the right direction. Someone who’s gone before you or who’s kayaked this river before. They know the rapids ahead. They’ve seen the rocks, tree branches, and whirlpools and they can point which way to paddle.
Occasionally, life and circumstances have given me a second to spare and look at the obstacles. The close calls and near misses. There’s something visceral about seeing what happens when someone goes down the wrong side of the river. Much like the “play the tape forward” strategy in recovery where we imagine what the rest of an evening would look like if we did cave in to that sip of wine or that margarita, watching someone else not take the kayaker’s advice and get walloped by rapids has an impact too.
There’s a scene in the movie Wonder that I will never forget. A mother and her teenage daughter are bonding on the couch in a casual evening watching TV. You can tell the daughter wants to use this time to connect with her mom but the mom is slowly fading away with glass after glass of wine til she passes out on the couch. It was such a small moment of that movie, and yet it’s the only scene I distinctly remember. “I don’t want to be that mom,” I thought to myself, even as I did that very thing regularly.
I wasn’t sober when I saw that movie. It would be months before I quit. But that movie scene etched a space in my memories for further reflection. My conscious would occasionally offer me that visual to remind me what direction I don’t want to go. Not only was that the path with dangerous obstructions, it was also more often than not the direction I was heading straight towards.
I don’t want to be the mom that passes out on the couch in front of her children. I don’t want to be the person who can’t remember moments (or even hours) of the night before. And I don’t want to be someone who can’t stand proudly and firmly by everything I do and say; something I could never say when my blackouts and brownouts started to escalate. And while sobriety isn’t a team sport, it absolutely takes a team. I may take wrong turns. I may even capsize on occasion. But I never want to paddle this river alone and thanks to my sober community, I will never have to.
In kayaking, no one embarks on a new river blindly. It’s a whole process, where they scout the river first and check the water levels, waves, wind, and access points for launching and landing. Newer kayakers go with experienced ones to help them lead the way. And while kayakers paddle their own crafts, they almost never go alone.
I think we can learn a thing or two from the golden rules of kayaking. 1) Don’t go it alone 2) Let someone more experienced lead and point the way, and 3) Enjoy the most invigorating, sometimes bumpy, but important ride of your life.
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