Month: February 2013

What Lasts

Rachel Henry5 Comments

It is scary to be old enough to have had a 20-year high school reunion. On the other hand, it is amazing to be old enough to gather with former school friends all of whom are capable of recognizing and celebrating the various ways we’ve become adults.

During winter carnival weekend, a small group of friends from junior high and high school gathered to watch street events and reconnect with Steamboat and with each other. People in the group have done impressive things—become doctors or engineers, sold everything and started over with a new lifestyle that fit better, given birth. Perhaps most impressive to me was that we all still enjoyed each other.

Some of these people I see annually and some I hadn’t seen for over twenty years, but we still laughed and told stories not as if time hadn’t passed but rather with a miraculous ease in spite of being aware that it had.

The idea that the friendships we make before age 25 are more lasting than those we make later in life has come up in conversation recently. I doubt this is uniformly true, but I think there’s something to it.

Things enter us differently when we’re children than when we’re adults—landscape, music, language; so many things go straight into our DNA, so to speak, unquestioned and unfiltered by the layers of judgment we practice as adults. Perhaps this is true for childhood friendships, too—they get wired in somehow.

It’s nice to know that even when our daily thinking and acting is overlaid with adult concerns, we can rediscover the connections we formed when life was more immediate. And see what good choices our younger selves made.

I Like It Here

Rachel Henry7 Comments

When I was growing up, the promotional video for my hometown of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, featured a bunch of guys sporting Magnum P.I. mustaches sitting in a hot tub singing, “Steamboat, Steamboat, I like it here.” Though the video has been updated several times since then, I still agree with the lyrics.

horse pulling a child on skis down a street in front of a crowd
Ski joring down Lincoln Avenue in Steamboat. Photo courtesy of Jonathan Boeke.

Steamboat recently celebrated its 100th Winter Carnival, and I attended along with my family and a number of friends from high school. Here are a few of the reasons why it was so much fun.

One: carnival buttons, which get you into all the weekend events and are often seen pinned to ski hats, still cost only $10. I bought mine off a woman on the bus who had an extra.

Two: the carnival is a liability nightmare. Put skis on small children, give them a rope to hold, tie the other end of the rope to a horse and tell the rider to go as fast as possible down a street covered in a couple feet of snow. Just for fun, add a jump in the middle. Or start with a 50 meter ski jump. Wait until dark. Add a flaming hoop and have people jump through it. Just for fun, let one of them pull a toboggan that is on fire.

Three: though the population of the town has more than doubled since I was a kid (to a whopping 12,000), everyone still puts on four layers of clothing and stands around in the snow for six hours cheering for the kids and the horses. Occasionally a kid lets go of the rope before she crosses the finish line and then has to ski half a block or so on her own. Everyone cheers the loudest for these kids, and every single kid who let go of the rope crossed the finish line even though she knew she wouldn’t win.

Four: nowhere else in the world will you see a rugby team, a refrigerator, and a running gas grill on skis. There was sauerkraut for the hotdogs.

Five: keeping the local ranchers at the center of the festivities as riders and parade participants somehow ties the different parts of the community together in a way that doesn’t happen in many places.

Six: the lighted man. Yes, he is shooting fireworks out of his backpack. Yes, it is the coolest thing ever.

Plan to buy your buttons for the 101st.

Feeling Monkish

Rachel Henry4 Comments

Explaining monks is a little like explaining to someone who wasn’t a teenager in the 1980s why The Breakfast Club deserves a place in the respected canon of film. That is to say, you had to be there.

Nevertheless, because I recently spent two wonderfully peaceful days at St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, I’ll make an attempt.

Monks are not saints and will be the first to tell you so. They are men who have chosen to dedicate themselves to a certain way of life. That sentence contains three difficult concepts: choice, dedication, and way of life.

Looking at what monks provide their guests may help with understanding those ideas; they give you exactly what you need and nothing more. One frying pan, a large saucepan, a small saucepan, a colander. Four each of cups, glasses, large plates, small plates.

No unnecessary choices are offered to distract you from the most important choice: to spend some time with God. Monks are like that—focused on what’s important.

That is not to say their minds don’t wander. The monastic days that I’m familiar with contain at least four communal prayer services precisely because monks know they need a lot of reminding.

They know they’re likely to get annoyed with the guy in the next cell because of the way he gargles or his ridiculous opinions about the way the church should be run, and they’ve accepted that those irritations only pull them away from their center. They’ve chosen what’s important to them and structured their lives around it in a way that takes their humanity into account.

The result is this amazing capacity for love. Love for each other, love for their visitors, love that flows out and fills the chapel and the entire valley.

I think we could all do this if we chose what was important to us and mustered up enough dedication to build a way of life around whatever we chose. It helps to have a few people around who will hold you to it.

Where’s There?

Rachel Henry3 Comments

Having an obsession and fulfilling that obsession are two very different things. I’ve been getting ready to go on vacation, which generally sends me into an OCD quest of trying to tie up every possible loose end between 10 p.m. and midnight the night before I leave.

Given the lack of tied-up-ness in my daily life and the late hour at which I start, I usually stay up until I am forced to give up. At this point, I feel a surprising amount of peace.

A friend said in the comments last week that when she’s focused on the future, she gets frustrated that she’s not there yet. I only feel that way approximately 99.8% of the time. I think that’s what’s nice about getting ready to leave: it’s a defined, immutable “there.” The plane will leave at 6:27 a.m. whether you’ve watered the plants or not.

It’s interesting that it’s not so much the getting everything done before leaving as the simple existence of a cut-off point that brings that peaceful feeling. I perceive the “there yet” that I torture myself with as having to do with lack of accomplishment, whether tangible or interior, but this experience suggests otherwise.

It suggests that the ever-changing nature of the finish line causes more anxiety than what’s happening in the actual race. If every moment could be its own finish line, I wouldn’t have to worry about this whole journey thing.