From the desk of the Executive Director, Teresa Jordan – This past Sunday my son and I packed a lunch and headed off for a canoe paddle down a section of our Pigeon river. The day was wonderful, sunny and cool, and the water was like glass.
While we are not experts, we canoe often, and we quickly found our rhythm. Not sure really what happened, but we failed to communicate, we were perhaps both shifting, and the next thing I knew I was in the very cold water.
The Pigeon river has no real bottom and my jean clad legs were sinking deeper into the unknown. I was in the water, my shoes lost to a muddy grave, and I was cold. My drenched son was bailing with what seemed like a bucket from Barbie’s boat kit, it took a long time.
In those cold minutes in the river I had to focus on one thing: buried in 8 inches of mud, how was I going to get back into the canoe?
Thankfully, Spencer found a root in the riverbed that would hold us high enough to hike ourselves back into the canoe.
So, there we were, drenched, cold, covered in that weird black mud of the river, and back in the canoe with our soggy lunch.
And you know what we did next? We both burst our laughing; we laughed until we cried and promised each other not to tell anyone that we had overturned (editorial note … too late!).
Sometimes miscommunication and or misfortune dumps us into the cold. And while the mud and cold is easy to wallow in, the business at hand is finding a solution that you can stand on. Find the joy of successful problem solving even if it’s covered in mud.
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