Synchronicity, Part 2: Eddy or Current, Eddy or Current.

When I was seventeen, I was very fortunate to spend a summer in Banff on a senior Outward Bounds leadership course with the Royal Canadian Army Cadets. Other than one huge tactical error, it was a great summer.

The tactical error? I had the choice of being in an all-male or a mixed-gender company and I let a slightly more gung-ho buddy of mine convince me that all-male was the only way to go for a proper full-on Outward Bound experience. Thanks to his enthusiasm, I chose unwisely.

I can still remember (and can still see myself on the internal cinemascope) standing in line for the mixed gender company and making that fateful choice at the last minute. Had I been in front of him in the line, I might not have had enough time to change my mind. Lesson learned. Remember, if someone asks if you are a god, always say, “yes” and, when you have the choice, a mixed-gender social unit is the only way to go. Males without the moderating influence of females are, well, too male.

Really, had I paid closer attention to The Sun Also Rises (a book I blame for much of my adolescent skulking) I would have already known this and that summer I probably would have got laid by some ridiculously fit Outward Bound hottie. (For my more romantic readers feel free to substitute “would have got laid by” with “would have fallen in love with”). The other lesson implied by The Sun Also Rises (and reams of research) is that females are way better off (on just about every imaginable calculus) without males. It is a fact that perpetually perplexes me — why haven’t they jettisoned our half of the species yet?

On Wednesday, I had a catch-up with Brad an old friend from my University of Calgary days. We found each other thanks to the magic of Facebook and then we discovered we are both in Ottawa — much to everyone’s surprise. Naturally, we had a beer down at the good ol’ Chez Lucien and I learned that while I was off getting a PhD, Brad was off becoming an entrepreneur.

While I was telling Brad about my recent theatrical endeavors, Ann (who turns out to be Managing Director of the Magnetic North Theatre Festival) happened to overhear and join our conversation and we had a great brainstorming session about the state of theatre and how to get money into the system and bums into seats. Essentially, on the very day I was explicitly humming and hawing about this arts-orientated enterprise idea I have brewing, circumstance brought me together with two people who could provide the very conversation that would put fire in my belly and who could also be hugely helpful in sorting out my plans. Synchronicity, part 2.

On that Outward Bound course, I climbed a mountain (literally), white-water canoed, and did a lot of hiking and camping — notably a week near a glacier. It was on one of those long glacier hikes that I was so moved by the grandeur of the Rockies that I first tried to write poetry on my own initiative. It was my first encounter with the lightness of being and my first effort to make sense of it with words. It’s very possible that if I had been making ga-ga eyes with some fit lass, I might never have made the effort.

I don’t remember how the ranking system works for rapids, but I do recall that we canoed in the roughest water that canoes are allowed to run. I also remember that the scariest moments were not in running the rapids or even in capsizing and swimming for an eddy. Instead, the scariest moment was in the means by which the canoe re-entered the current from the swirling stillness of the eddy.

The person in the bow reaches far out from the canoe with his paddle and holds it in the current and the current pulls the paddle, the man, and eventually the canoe into the racing water. During that long reach from the bow, from the stillness of the eddy to the rush of water, there is always an awkward moment before the different gears of physics catch and haul the paddle, man, and canoe downstream, a moment when the man looks down at the unmistakeable line between eddy and current, when he sees and feels the power of the current but remains a part of the eddy’s stillness, when he is acutely aware of a choice he might have otherwise made, when he is stretched between eddy and current waiting for the gears of physics to catch.

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