I stand corrected…

A few days ago, when writing about lessons learned while skiing, I made passing reference to our culture’s deification of explorers and discoverers – of bold adventurers.  My guess as to how many people try such things and fail was off by more than an order of magnitude.  According to Alec Wilson, who recently wrote a book (The Ice Balloon) about a failed polar expedition, 751 died trying to reach the North Pole in the late 1800s.  Note the qualifiers.  This figure does not include individuals who died in the 1900s, nor individuals who died at any time trying to reach some other place, such as Mt Everest or the South Pole.  In case you were wondering, more than 200 have died trying to climb Everest.  Only 17 died trying to reach the South Pole between 1897 and 1922.  And I can find evidence of only one expedition resorting to cannibalism.

The question for me as a Christian is not whether “a live donkey is better than a dead horse,” as Shackleton put it (a man who nonetheless died on expedition – the second expedition after assuring his family that he had no desire for further exploring.)  I prefer to paraphrase my former CPE instructor, Rev. Marion Thullberry, who would repeatedly remind me that I needed to CHOOSE the hill upon which I was prepared to die.  Which she did mean metaphorically (there are many hills on which I have staked friendships and other relationships, upon which I have staked position, reputation, or career.)  But it applies literally as well.  What is worth dying for?

Explorers are those who will risk death in order to know the truth of a place first hand.  Or, to put it another way, they would rather die than not be the first to know a particular place in a particular way.  Upon reflection, my problem with these “men of great daring” is not that they think too big, but instead that they think too small.  Knowledge is worth dying for?  Knowledge of the Earth or of space or of the limits on one’s own body?  No, knowledge may be a means to an end, a useful thing to have on particular occasions.  But knowledge pales beside love.  As for knowledge, it will come to an end – but Love never ends.  For God is love.  And we are called to love one another as Christ loved us, which is to say that Christians are called to die on behalf of one another, for love of God and love of one another.  Which we can do without fear because we know that we have nothing to lose.  Not because our lives are without value, but because God loves us beyond any human understanding of value, and will not allow us to die forever.

But I still stand before the previous post about slowing down – because I trust that God does not wish for me to go up in flames for something as trivial as proving that I am smart or productive or possessing any other “virtue.”  As both Jesus and Paul warn us in the New Testament, we need to be more concerned about our reputation with God than our reputation with *anyone* else.  So long before I reach the precipice of martyrdom, I need to be asking myself, “What exactly am I witnessing to here?”  And if the answer is anything less than “The love of God as revealed in Jesus,” then it is time for me to change course.

Downhill skiing

My husband is an excellent ski instructor.  As a child, he went skiing for a week or so every year, starting in preschool – so by rights he should be a lousy instructor, because skiing is second nature to him.  But he is a keen observer – of people above all – and so he is very good at passing on the skills he has, even when passing them on requires taking a totally different approach than the one he himself used.

We went skiing this weekend for what was only the fourth time in my life (although arguably the first time, when I was 15, might more accurately be described as downhill careening.)  As when we went two years ago, my husband was shepherding our young daughter down the hill.  Which meant that I was only semi-supervised:  whenever he and Hannah were at a standstill, Brian would turn to me and give me a pointer and a half before needing to return his attention to Hannah, who within those 20 seconds or so had taken to happily chomping on well-travelled over snow.

As we headed from the plateau where the chair lift had deposited us to the slope, Brian asked me, “What do you need to know?”  ”I think I’m in good shape right now,” I replied confidently.  About 20 meters downslope, all too aware that I was now going too fast for me to control, I threw myself down in the snow.  Brian looked back, not having seen what led to my now comically rag-doll evoking posture.  To the amusement of a pair of snowboarders, sitting together a few meters upslope, I shouted to him (I hope) good-naturedly, “I wish I had asked you how to stop!”

Once I was upright, I made my way the short way down to Brian and Hannah – where he made this suggestion:  ”Go a little slower, a little easier than you are comfortable with.  That way, when you hit a spot where you speed up (as you inevitably will), you won’t be going faster than you can handle.”

And with that, I made it down the rest of the slope with a lot more enjoyment and less anxiety.  And I had a good time down the slope the next time, too – even though we took a more difficult initial approach.  At the end of that last run, I thanked Brian – that had been the advice I was most needing to hear to improve my skiing: not to push it.  The mountain would push me more than enough.

As I pulled into the parking lot at my daughter’s preschool yesterday, I was driving faster than I ought to have been – I was running late, having once again allowed one minute less than I would have needed to get there under perfect conditions.  And, as usual, the conditions were less than perfect.  As I came around the corner of an SUV parked at the end of a row of cars, I braked less than a car’s length from a little boy who had wandered away from the truck’s open door.  Brian’s advice came to me again at that moment, adjusted for the situation: “Allow a little more time than you need to.  That way, when delays come (as they inevitably will), you won’t be late and inattentive and almost knock down a preschooler.”

I spend so much of my life careening downhill.  I take on one more responsibility, I add one more skill, I invite one more person – I test my limits – right up to the edge of what I am comfortable with.  Without accounting for all of the things I cannot account for!  That is, I forget that the mountain will push me more than enough – that life throws all sorts of things at us that we were not counting on, and that we had not made time for in our schedule.

In our culture we celebrate (mostly) men (and some women, too) who pushed themselves to their limits and “achieved great things.”  That they cannibalized half their expedition team, even after learning from the earlier mistakes of six other people who died making the same attempt – that sort of thing is best brushed over.  What we consider to be “achievements” says a lot about what we expect of ourselves and each other as a culture.

As for me, I am learning that I am not cut out for careening.  I am not interested in seeing “how fast this baby can go” and losing myself on a forgotten hairpin curve.  Sure, there are emergencies that call for taking a chance on fast and edgy – life will push us more than enough.  But in the meantime I am going to stop trying to figure out how to prove how much I can do and how fast I can do it.  Instead of speeding up, what I need right now is to slow down.