Epiphany

The “ah-hah moment.” The light goes on. I got it.

It’s a good feeling. I had one today and what makes it especially sweet is that it was in something that doesn’t come naturally to me.

Last week, I was teaching some people how to roll a kayak. Some pick that up in a matter of minutes. They were among the few way back in gym class who watched a quick demo of the parallel bars dismount and then stuck a perfect one on the first try. I was in the other minority – the ones who wound up painfully straddling a rail. So, kayak rolling did not come easily to me.

But it eventually did. Through arduous efforts and determination, I worked my way up through the ranks: onside roll, offside roll, combat roll, rodeo roll, handpaddle roll and – drum roll, please – hand roll.

In the upper echelons, my batting percentage wasn’t a thousand and it still felt like I was walking through the steps. But, I do know the steps and can roll, so I teach.

In that process last week, I rattled off the essentials of success, just as they had been told to me dozens of times and I had repeated a hundredfold. The two critical success factors are don’t pick up your head and don’t yank on your paddle.

Not as easy as it seems. When you’re dangling upside down in an oxygen-free environment, every instinct you have screams at you to pick up your head. And, when you have a paddle in your hands with a dire need to change your inverted position, you feel compelled to use it.

There are a few other keys and I was relating one to a student. I received a mental cuff across the back of my head, and not for the first time. I don’t really follow that instruction. I have passed that along more times than I can count, but I don’t practice it.

I’ve had this thought a number of times but seldom get beyond pondering that point. For some reason it stayed with me on the drive home. Why don’t I do that? I concluded that when I first started to effect a roll, after laborious if not skillful efforts, I was still relying on effort as opposed to technique. It wasn’t entirely correct, but it worked. Most of the time. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Enter Jonathan Livingston Seagull. What if I took my own advice? Would I approach effortless perfection? Would I become one with the kayak? More importantly, would I reduce the percentage of times I left shin skin on boulders?

What do I have to lose by going down that road? Well, I did harbor the fear that I could mess up whatever technique I had that was working. Heck with that, let’s go for the gold.

Today I trucked my kayak up to the lake and paddled over to my favorite practice cove. I silently repeated the mantra of what I had to do. I imagined a fearful explosion if I failed to execute it. Not great imagery but it would have to do for the spur of the moment.

I flipped the kayak over, froze the paddle in space and snapped my hips, applying the technique. Bingo. Sunlight and warmth. Holy crap! It works! Could this be why every instructor on earth has been telling this to me for decades? Nah.

Too good to be true. Maybe it was a fluke. I dove beneath the waves once again. With almost no effort, I was back up with a fluid motion that was alien to me. Better yet, I could feel the process and its rightness. It was no longer blindly walking through the steps. I joyously repeated the process numerous times.

At my age, I don’t have a lot of skill breakthroughs. Epiphanies are a good thing.