Rescue

Gun’s Quote-of-the-Week:

“What would have happened if I didn’t initiate my own rescue?”
-The Gun

So, it has come to this… I’ve run out of quotes that I’ve collected over the years and now I get to quote myself. This blog has reached a new low. Haha!

This past week I found myself rolling the above statement around my cranium. I’m not sure why.

It was written down in my journal which I have been writing on-and-off again over the course of the last 10-or-so years. The above quote came on Day 2 of Covecrest, a Catholic summer camp that I helped chaperone that year. (2009) During white-water rafting, I got tossed out of the raft. The cheesy, somewhat fear-mongering video we were made to watch before setting out on the water clearly explained what we were to do if we were flung in to the water. Lay flat on your back, like a board, with feet pointed downstream. Attempting to stand up could get your ankle caught under a rock and snap your foot off like a twig in the current, especially if another person or raft had the misfortune of running in to you.

Floating along, a person would throw a yellow rope towards you which you were supposed to grab. Then, you would be pulled back to a raft or on to shore.

So, here I am, lying flat on my back, helpless, waiting for somebody else to throw me a line a save me.

Did I mention I have no idea how to swim?

Eventually I heard somebody shouting “Swim! Swim!” I turned around and saw the yellow rope behind me and to my right. Didn’t even notice it was there.

I did manage to doggy-paddle towards the rope, grabbed a hold, and got pulled back in to the raft. Had I been content to lay there on my back, helpless, I would have just floated down the river and drowned.

Then I found out my guide intentionally flipped the raft. (I’ll leave the part out about how I visualized punching him in the throat. I like being on top of water, not below it.) He explained that this was a “safe” rapid to fall out of the raft because the river was so deep. It would give all of us an “opportunity” to practice the back-floating procedure and look for, swim towards and grab yellow rescue ropes. Now having that experience of what we needed to do in case something went wrong, we could now proceed down the river and in to the, err, “unsafe” rapids.

I guess there are countless times in life which you find yourself out of your raft and in the river. There are sharp rocks below you, rapids in front of you and other rafts careening towards you. In order to survive, you need the help of other people. That said, people can throw you dozens of ropes and it will do nothing unless you make some effort on your part to get to one of them.

We have to accept help from other people, yes, but we also have to swim our way to them. We have to initiate our own rescue.

I’ve been pulled out of many situations that were ugly, thanks to the efforts of my family and friends. I still had to ask for the help. I still had to be honest with them about what was happening in my life. I still had to accept that help. In most cases, I had to pursue that help. Nobody is going to going to offer you something if you are not willing to accept it and, more often, willing to ask for it.

I never punched that guide in the throat. (OK, let’s be honest… he was jacked, tatted and knew how to throw people out of his raft without dunking himself. I wouldn’t have gotten far…) As a matter of fact, I was thankful I got tossed. He knew the river was bigger than me, the current was bigger than me and the rocks were bigger than me. I learned that I needed to be a part of my own rescue in order to truly be saved.

In the rivers of our lives, the same holds true.

...and that’s why it’s a Gun’s Quote!!