Thanksgiving

You have not arrived. Keep searching.

I wrote this long ago. Whenever I revisit this essay it has changed, or I have. Days and terms have taken on new meaning. Friends and family have come and gone, and come. The very way ahead has shifted, its length shortened by another year or three. Life imperatives insist differently these days and yet some ideas are universal, perhaps timeless. Let us be grateful if only for the fact that we are alive to do so.

/

Although it never used to be more than a day of feasting and drinking to me, these days Thanksgiving is a celebration of family. On my bike ride today cars were parked in normally empty streets, homes filled with light and warmth I'd never seen during the miles I have logged over these roads. Family and friends come together. And hopefully it means something. Hopefully our experiences during the past year have improved us, and given us the skill to share it, or the wisdom not to.

Experience forges us, changes us. We make new bonds, new families. By our choices and actions and experience we look for family, for tribe, and if we don't find it we create it. Today my family was in the gym, made up of the guys I have been training for the last few years, the men who have been teaching me as I have taught them.

Today the Thanksgiving communication I received came from new family - what I consider my precious blood family (though parents and siblings might beg to differ). A climbing partner called, the bond of that rope has never broken. A thinking and creative partner wished me well by text message. Faraway friends and students, and work partners, sent notes, set fires, told of adventures recent, and the challenges of the future. Later we ate and drank and laughed with our neighbors.

On the occasion of Thanksgiving we celebrate family and tribe, we engage in rituals, we reach across time zones and oceans to greet those with whom we don't normally communicate. It's a good day. And I am thankful for my friends, for strong bonds, and unbreakable links.

In the context of the gym, this evening I wrote to an athlete who trains with us. To be clear, elsewhere the coach-athlete relationship may be mechanistic but here, because I care, because I invest myself in the process and in the people that relationship grows into something else. Growth being the operative term. Discussions don't stall on silly stuff like reps and sets and the various tools - that shit is simply a means to an experience. Instead we discussed transformation, the evolution of athletic and personal goals, and finally, the powerful influence of water, in all its forms on the psyche. Once a water athlete always a water athlete. If it resonates with one's temperament it is difficult to escape. Environment shapes us if we immerse ourselves in it.

I suggested that we must consider it luck or ourselves blessed when we find that thing, some thing, perhaps THE thing that speaks to the heart of us, without interpretation, directly. In the moment I was harnessed to the context of sport and experience but the concept is universal. If we trust ourselves enough and believe in ourselves enough to BE who we truly are and not simply who others say we are (or should be) then we might get lucky enough to find the thing that defines us or describes us or allows us to live fully, fulfilled.

I think it's rare to find that thing. Maybe not in my circle, which is made up of people who have shaped their lives precisely to pursue the discovery and experiencing of that thing, but out there in the great wide world, it's rare indeed. I was lucky to find the mountains and to be found by them. I am forever changed. That sort of change is an uncommon and hard experience but one we seek once we understand we can survive it, and thrive from it. So it becomes the guiding light, to keep seeking, even as objectives and values evolve.

You have not arrived. Keep searching.

And be grateful for having the freedom to do so.