Malcolm Gladwell's book, "Outliers" claims that exceptionally skilled individuals in various realms share the common trait of having spent 10,000 hours developing their expertise. That breaks down to about 3 hours a day for 10 years. This has rankled me profoundly because I lack consistency and focus. I envy my friends who have shown plodding consistence through academia, or unrewarding work, until they achieve a position of mastery. I envy those who always knew what they loved and have worked at that for years. I envy those who act like they've got a plan.
Because I never have. I've wandered lost since high school, and maybe before then. "Not all those who wander are lost.", a close friend has quoted me from LOTR, when I'm in dark places, and I've always appreciated the gesture, but refrained from answering, "Yah, but some of them are". Because I was. Lost.
And still am. There's a lot of bad stuff going on out there, a lot of misguided actions. I could be making a lot of money working for things that I don't care about it, and I often feel like a failure for not doing so. Living in the DC area, a lot of people I know work for what I think of as the Death Machine. Benign and earnestly virtuous and well-intentioned as they may be, they're working on the Death Machine. They're killing all the angels.
I worked in IT for years and believed that not working for bad things was enough. IT is neutral, it has the potential to be beneficial and is at least not explicitly evil. It's also very profitable. I lazily coasted the dotboom for a few years until I was making more than my dad at the apex of his career as a civil engineer at the World Bank. And then hit the dotcrash. During both phases, most of the work I was doing made little sense. I certainly didn't give much of a damn about it.
9/11 knocked me out of my pattern. Before that I believed that I could just buzz along like all the other happy worker bees. After 9/11 I quit my lazy $75K work-from-home geek job and tried to find ways to be meaningfully involved in reality. It took me years to do so. I'm still not quite there.
None of which is the point of this diary. The point is, I LOVE THE DC SNOWSASTER! I've been out every day frolicking! Snow-biking, snow-kayaking, snow-hiking, snow-jogging! It's gorgeous! I'm Canadian! I have good winter gear! Including gaiters! I'm unstoppable! The last week has been paradise, few cars on the road, plenty of quiet, and all the nature places I've been visiting for years are wilder and more beautiful than usual.
Last Sunday I drove out to one of my favorite put-in spots on the Potomac. It would have been nice to claim first, but there were 20 or 30 cars lined up along the road, beside the 3-foot high snow ramparts from the plowings. I was a few minutes ahead of the next kayakers, but others had gone before. I dragged my boat down to the river by tracking through fresh snow, leaving the established rut to the X-country skiers.
It was pleasantly exhausting, pushing through thigh-high snow. And the quiet was profoundly satisfying. There are few places and moments in the DC area that are free of the whine and grind of traffic. 9/11 was one, and this another. It was a cold afternoon, the snow a gritty powder, that I waded through like I would a swamp, my breathing intense, hot in the cold like a candle in the dark.
When my blood thrummed up too hard from the effort I'd stop and breathe, watch the white winter world as my heartbeat calmed, and caw to the crows that still flew and called. Vultures coasted overhead. All else was silent but the skreeing collapse of mounds of snow from trees, and the general echo of quiet. By the time I got to the river I was sweating and panting in my wetsuit.
The river was wide like an auditorium, open. I slid my kayak in and was almost immediately stalled by ice, had to break, slash and fight through the crust to get to open water. I hadn't realized how cold it had been, to freeze the river like that. The river was up, and moving placidly fast, a muted flood that I drifted downstream, stopped to wade a tributary up to its source-pool, sat buddha in the snow as the cold condensed and watched the still, my breath a mist, heart and blood beating against the silence like a butterfly.
The water was stronger than I'd anticipated, a smooth cold laminar flow like death but I didn't fear it. I crested up on the prow of a downstream island, broke and slogged my way across the ice, and pulled my boat up onto a snowbank, wetting my gloves in the process. The island had cliff ramparts, and I thrashed deep in the virgin snow, warmed by the effort. I found hollows in the snow where deer had slept, followed their absurd leaps through the snow, 8 feet at a bound. I flushed squirrels that skittered and skirred at me, and birds that flitted from snow-mounded shelters to awkward braces on snow-covered branches.
I would have camped overnight but had no good place to park. Paddling out, upstream, I met the force of the river, bracing through rafts of grinding ice, which growled and snarled at my boat like brief angry dogs. The ice had been ground into rounded chunks by Great Falls, a mile upstream, and washed at me in coherent floes, 5-20 feet across. I followed the iceline along the east side of the river, where the flow was slightly muted by the shoreline, 20-50 feet away.
At one point, I hit a dense flow, stronger than I could paddle, stripped off my awkwardly wet gloves and dug in, bracing hard against the rush of the river and gaining slight millimeters per stroke. The cold bit hard at my fingers and I knew if I gave up, I'd be swept half a mile downstream before I could find a calm spot to recover. I pushed on, beat the flow-point while dodging ice floes, paddled past as my hands numbed into claws until I reached a lee close to shore, broke ice and then crested the snowbank, pulled my kayak up and then finally stopped to warm my hands.
For a few minutes I thought my hands might be seriously frostbitten. They were painfully cold, my fingers unresponsive, and I considered the embarrassment of calling 9/11. I pulled on dry socks as mittens and rubbed my hands until they recovered, then pulled the kayak behind me like a sled upslope in the dark the half-mile to where I'd parked.
During the flow-battle, after mulling for the last hour on the Outliers model of expertise, I'd had the sudden realization, that I was expert in various ways. Expert in nature, for the many hours I'd spent within. Expert in reading, for the many hours I'd spent with books and online.
It was an exuberant realization, to recognize that all those many hours I'd spent hiking and running and camping in the wild, all those many hours I'd spent working with environmental groups, caring about hopeless things, documenting atrocities, sitting through meetings, reading depressing books and emails, leading kids into wildernesses, had all been part of a competence. I have spent many thousands of hours honing blades that I had until that moment never appreciated.
It took skill and love to drag a kayak through 2 feet of snow on a painfully cold afternoon. It took skill and love to exit unharmed and exhilirant. The time I spent building those skills, the time I've spent exhilirant in nature, the time I spend writing about it, are all part of an expertise I did not fully appreciate before now. I am an expert, and I know my path now.