Years ago, while living in Calgary, we knew a couple who got heavily enmeshed in the world of personal development Tony Robbins style. Not actually Tony Robbins or his company, but a similar type of business the name of which, after all these years, I can't remember, if I ever knew it.
This couple were quite evangelical about their program of personal development. I remember that because I went to an introductory seminar with the female partner of the couple, and, while I did not succumb to the seductions of the well orchestrated speaking program which promised to make all my dreams come true, some other mutual friends did.
Strangely, the one thing I remember about the introductory seminar I went to was the pneumatic breasts of the female presenter. They were far too perfect and this was in a time when cosmetic plastic surgery was not that common and those big and seemingly impeccable hooters were pretty obviously fake. Which is odd in a personal development guru, but perhaps the universe gifted her the knockers she had always wanted. I don't know. What I do know, is that they would have been costly back then so clearly the personal development gig was a lucrative one.
This, however, is all a rather wordy digression from the main point of the story which is that the couple or the movement more precisely - because I noticed the same thing in other mutual acquaintances who were drawn into the circle of endless personal development - had their own language in which they communicated. I don't mean a different language with a new alphabet, but a language of idiom that was so idiosyncratically the language of personal development that it was unmistakable.
Whilst engaged in the boring but necessary duties of modern life today - you know, taking out the bins, vacuuming the floors - I was listening to a climbing podcast and two guys talking about adventuring, and I instantly recognised the language because, it turns out, adventurers have a shared language as well. Climbers, paddlers, skiers - combatants in the "adrenaline" sports have long been known to have a common language. Spend an evening among normal folk and pepper your conversation with crimps, flashes, beta-spray, not to mention pink point, red point, and head point, and soon your dinner companions will be searching for an exit strategy as quickly as Scott Morrison looks for an excuse or a photo opportunity.
The main benefit of shared language, however, is not that it allows us to quickly and comprehensively describe the climb, the river or the ski descent, but that it allows adventurers to recognise each other.
I spent an hour or so today talking to a guy who had just bought a second hand kayak and was interested in joining our state wide sea kayak club. The first thing any sea kayaker will do in this situation is find out what boat the new paddler has acquired because, in the absence of a sea kayak you can't really kayak on the sea; the place where wind, tide and swell rule. Just like you cannot ski in the backcountry without touring bindings, skis and boots, there is one absolute piece of equipment required for paddling on the sea and that is a sea-worthy boat.
It turns out, perhaps unhappily for this guy, that he bought a lake boat with no front bulkhead - among other deficiencies - so I had to break it to him that his plan to paddle the high seas in this boat was going nowhere. A tough task, and I am not sure he believed me, after all, the shop assistant at the "other" kayak store had told him to stuff the bow with pool noodles. Sure, I had a vision, as do you now, of the kayak pitch-poling in the surf and the brightly coloured pool noodles exploding out into the swash zone with kayak going one way, paddler another, and a dozen pool noodles every which way. Of course, that is not even the half of the issue, how would this boat handle wind, waves, tides, swell; it would not, of course, it is a lake boat. But we had no shared language with which I could explain this.
So I talked about wind and weather cocking, swell, and sea, tidal currents and all the things that meant that this boat was not equipped to go onto the open ocean, but we had no shared language of adventure and so he could not understand why this boat - reviewed as "handling waves well" in Mens Journal - was not going to work.
One winter in Nelson, I had a new guy come along on an early season ski trip I was leading for our local mountaineering club, equipped, on the advice of the local gear shop owner, in big heavy boots, wide skis and the most robust, and coincidentally heavy (and expensive) touring bindings on the market. When he asked our opinion of his new set up, we said the only thing possible, "all your gear is too heavy and you won't be able to keep up." Another tough conversation as he had just dropped several thousand dollars on this shiny new and weighty gear. He dismissed this out of hand as the shop owner, who clearly knew more than us, had assured him that this was the gear he needed for the backcountry. New guy made it half an hour from the parking lot before turning back exhausted.
And, it was all so obvious because we had no shared language of adventure, not with any of the shop owners or the ski guy or the new kayak guy.
No comments:
Post a Comment