Mystery or Adventure?
Mystery or Adventure?
The last Friday of the month, and Spring is officially right around the corner.
Each August I join a group of guys on a two-day kayaking trip down the Berg River. You pack everything you need into and onto your boat before setting off to complete the 110 kilometres to Velddrif. Some of the guys spend a lot of time on rowboats so they know what they are doing, but the rest of us are novices at best (including me). This was the third time I joined the trip, so I thought I had a good idea of what to expect.
I was mostly wrong.
Although we row down the same river each year, the river is never the same. There were heavy floods in the Western Cape in April, which caused plenty of enormous Blue Gum trees to fall into the water, along with other debris. It has not rained much since then, so the water level is low at this stage of the year. We encountered innumerable obstacles along the way, which made the going very slow and tedious. Often, we had to get out to carry the boats around obstacles (portage is the correct word for this); we fell over many times and lost valuables in the river – I lost one shoe, a pair of sunglasses and drowned an iPhone. One of the guys had a big fright when he got stuck in the boat after falling over.
We were all a bit rattled at the end of the first day. Typically, we aim to cover 65 kilometres on day one – this year we only managed 32 kilometres. It was surely impossible (for us) to do the rest on the second day; we had to come up with a new plan. But given that you are in a remote area, there are few options to get to a road where someone can pick us up. Luckily, we discovered a bridge (we hoped was still intact) not too far down the river where we could be picked up on the second day, which would become our new end destination.
After packing up our camping site, standing around having coffee and feeling pretty demoralised about not being able to complete the full distance, one of the guys shared a thought that stuck with me:
Life is an adventure to live, not a mystery to solve.
I think the reason this struck me is that I’ve been treating life as a mystery to solve recently – thinking about the “perfect” next steps to take, wanting to navigate my way to the end of the river, while I can’t even see past the next bend. Which is pretty exhausting and a total waste of time, if I’m honest. But I did not need to tell you that.
In his wonderful new book, What to Make of a Life, Jim Collins shares a concept he calls “simplex stepping”, which means taking the next small, sensible step without needing to see the whole path, then reassessing from wherever that step lands you. If you find yourself feeling confused, stuck or uncertain of which direction to take, take the next small, sensible step. That is what makes life an adventure: taking one step at a time and seeing where that leads you. Like we had to do on that river – rowing to the next obstacle and then deciding how to tackle it. We could not just stop and stay in the middle of nowhere, nor did we have the luxury of smooth sailing all the way to the end. Just like life.
There have been many times in life when I wanted a roadmap or a cheat sheet to tell me exactly what to do. Sometimes the next step is crystal clear, but now and again it’s not. But in the absence of those, the best we can do is take the next small, sensible step.
If you need some help navigating your next steps, get in touch. You can reach us at info@purposeworks.co.za.
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