Accidents and miracles are rarely the result of a single decision.
Prepare for battle! Pentax MX, Portra 800, September 2022.
‘All the lemons are starting to line up, Sloz’. a friend of mine told me once.
‘What do you mean, Lou?’
‘Well it’s a bit like this.” he explained to me.
“Imagine you’re at the pokies machine. You drop your coins in and you wait. If one lemon appears on the screen, nothing happens. If two lemons line up, still nothing happens. But if all five lemons line up, that’s when you hit the jackpot!”
I was borrowing Lou’s paddling equipment at the time, which included the sea kayak, pfd, paddle, the whole lot. Lou is a more experienced paddler than me and he was going through his check list to make sure I wasn’t going to drown using his equipment.
“Did you check the weather?”
“Are you taking a plb?”
“Are you gonna take the paddle float?”
When I answered ‘no’ to all these questions that’s when Lou said that the lemons are all starting to line up.
So I checked the weather and I did take a paddle float in the end. Three lemons down to one. And the trip went surprisingly smoothly. Thanks Lou. Thanks for teaching me about the lining up of the lemons! It’s an invaluable analogy when it comes to outdoor leadership.
Not sure what happened here, but I doubt the cause was a single lemon. Pentax MX, Portra 800, September 2022.
If it takes a series of bad decisions for an accident to happen, then the flip side also must be true. To achieve anything truly great must come from a series of outstanding decisions. It isn’t enough to fluke something once. We must consistently make a series of good decisions in order to arrive at a magical result.
The classic example that springs to mind is the amazing ability of any expert in their field. They say it takes about ten thousand hours of dedicated practice to become an expert at something. That’s about three hours of practice a day for nine years!
It’s so easy to jump on youtube, instagram or tik tok, and watch an amazing performance by someone who has been practicing that specific skill for an entire lifetime and think gheez how inadaquate of a human being am I, my skills don’t come even close!
The thing that’s easy to forget is that an accomplished expert, be it a musician, athlete, scientist or artist, has spent a lot of time practicing. Consistently, day after day, year after year. That’s how they got good at their skill.
Light and power. Pentax MX, Portra 800, September 2022.
On a final note though, it is worth acknowledging that there is always going to be an element of chance in our daily life. Chaos is always lurking just around the corner. Although it is rarely the case, accidents and miracles do happen, and our decisions have nothing to do with them. Sometimes, there are no lemons, then we get five of them dealt in a row. And if that’s case, we better simply grab that jackpot and run.
A.S. Lenah Valley, 21/10/2022.