Being Stuck in Life and Lessons Learned from Sledding

When I was a kid, I lived in a house on a very short dead-end street. Walking past my house one would enter a wooded field. In the middle of these woods was a water tower in the shape of a flying saucer. The top half was metal down to a five-foot drop onto the middle to bottom half which was all grass.

During the winter, dozens of kids, including me, would sled down the water tower which was now covered with snow. We’d trudge up to the top, then fly down, take the substantial 5-foot jump and continue down to the bottom until we ran out of steam. It was awesome!

Once in awhile the snow would have that icy, crunchy texture. So, less people would go sledding. The ones that did, would keep going over and over dozens of times because there was less traffic. How fun! But what would inevitably happen because of the type of snow and the repetitive sled rides, is that we would only have a small number of well-worn tracks to choose to go down with. Almost like a bobsled path, slightly indented with  frozen sides.

Here was the problem with that – the water tower was surrounded with a chain link fence at the bottom about 50 yards out. Now every year some wonderful, mysterious stranger would cut a 5X5 hole in the fence so that we could steer ourselves through the fence if we were really going fast. So the fence was never really a big deal. That changed on these icier days.

If you have ever sledded on icy snow, you go f*cking fast as hell. Which would have been great if we weren’t locked into the tight little ice ruts that we created, none of which led through the hole in the fence because when we started off the day the slushy snow kept us from going too fast. If we were smarter, we would have made sure the paths went through the hole in the fence. But we were just kids playing with little forethought to future consequences. Sound familiar?

So, midway into the day, we had a couple of options to the smashing into the fence full speed dilemma. Quit sledding. Never happening. Or we could struggle hard to veer off the path as we neared the metal fence. Well that took a lot of work and brought too much discomfort to the process.  The third option was to just say “f*ck it” and drive ourselves and sleds full force into the fence and see how banged up we would get. Again, we were pretty fearless, resilient and dumb kids. So that’s what we chose to do – go into the fence.

Some of you already see the analogy to being stuck in life. We have patterns that we follow over and over again, some not very healthy. If we don’t take notice early, we turn them into deep ruts with tall walls. BUT, we still have some choices. We can just quit, give up and go home. This option sucks though because we just slowly suffer and waste a lot of time being miserable.

We can do what I did as a kid. Know that we are stuck in an unhealthy pattern and say, “f*ck it”, and smash headfirst into a wall. Not a great result either. As we get older it usually results in a bad crash, hitting bottom type of disaster that takes a long time to recover from.