Slip, Sliding away

A couple of weeks ago my wife Ellie and I spent some time in Colorado cross country skiing. Have you ever tried cross country skiing? Or maybe you've tried a Nordic Track machine in a gym? cross country is quite different from downhill skiing - safer, slower, cheaper and less crowded. It's a terrific sport and in some ways it's like taking a walk or jog through the woods in the winter.

If you go where we go, you'll be skiing on groomed trails that have grooves, or tracks, set. That's right they actually put grooves in the snow and you keep your skis in the tracks and ski along the grooves.

And we like it best when the terrain is pretty flat - not too many hills or too many curves. But of course the real world of trails is not like that all the time. Sometimes there are hills; sometimes there are sharp curves; sometimes there are no tracks to follow. While in Colorado we skied one very beautiful area with lots of hills - many were steeper than we were comfortable with. In one case we were skiing our way up and up a trail. After about 200 yards of uphill, Ellie decided she'd take off her skis and walk the rest of the way to the top. I heard her say, "Oops" - not my favorite word to hear. I looked and saw that she'd taken off her ski, but the ski was still in the track.

We watched as the ski went slip sliding away - down the hill and gently around a curve. I volunteered to walk down - and back up - to get the runaway. I couldn't resist taking a picture looking back at Ellie way up the hill!

But can you see the bigger picture here? Sometimes I think my life should be like the ideal cross country ski trail: smooth, clearly marked, just enough change in terrain to make it interesting, but never bad enough that I could fall or fail.

But life is much different than that. Just when we think the trail is smooth and we've got everything well planned - circumstances change. We lose a job, or a friend, or a loved one. The market crashes - or our car does. These changes can happen to us as individuals, as a family, as a workplace or as a community.

One of the benefits of a "green and growing" attitude is that no matter what life throws at me - I can use it as a learning opportunity.