How's That Gonna Work?

Now, for the last three years, since I started down this path (some would say the path to insanity), and in the last two especially, since I turned my high-beams on moving to Aspen, people have been asking me, "Well, hows that going to work?"

How is that going to work with your kids, with money, with Tom, and now they want to know hows that going to work with Mike and his kids and your relationship, and have you found a place, and are you living there in the summer, or are you living in whitefish in the summer, and how is that going to work... People ask me this question all day long all the time.

And my answer has been the same, "I'm not sure" but it just now occurred to me why I have felt just fine saying that.

Its because I feel strongly that you can't know how its going to come out. I talk a lot about using my paddle.

I feel that life is like a river (I know, I know, but go with me here.) and its foolish to think you can force the river to go where you want it to. You can stand stubbornly in the river and use all your might and force to resist being swept off your feet. Or you can get in a boat and float where the current might take you.

Go with the flow as it were. But there are problems with that, as well. The river branches, there are snags, rapids and pitfalls. You do want to choose the direction you go. And I think often about dipping my paddle in the water and just course correcting the boat, while I let it float in the current.

Yes, occasionally, there is the call of "BACK PADDLE BACK PADDLE BACK PADDLE" and I have swamped my boat before, but I usually learn a very valuable lesson that I could only have learned by getting uncomfortably soaked in cold water and loosing half my stuff down river.

But for the most part, being mindful of the fact that the twists, turns and eddies of the flow of life are where the lessons are, and remembering to bring my paddle along, and use the sort of binary decider ("Is this on my path, or does it pull me off of it?"), eventually "How's that gonna work?" becomes clear.

So in answer, I don't know. I know I need and want to be in Aspen. That's where the jobs are that will allow me to pay for my family while working outside, and that's where the training is that will get me to the job I want the most, that of an instructor on the national team.

I know I'm on my path, I see it unfold in front of me, I use my paddle, and I trust that answers will be made of the puzzle pieces I hold in my hand as time goes by, as long as I am open to what comes my way, as long as I remember to periodically check to see if I can fit them together yet.

The answer to "How's that gonna work" is this blog. I don't know the answer till it happens. Ain't it grand?