BR 10: Stay in the Boat...and Paddle

Welcome to another podcast from Connie Sokol.

I am the founder of back to basics and I'm so glad you're having another minute for Connie on the go. This is those moments when you got two minutes to spare and you say, I want a little boost today. Want a little uplift? That's what this is for. Today's thought is about paddle now.

What does that mean?

Years ago in college, I'm embarrassed to say that I was invited to go to a rafting trip to go on one with my friends and we were excited to go because there were very cute boys that had asked us to go. The funny thing was that we were completely clueless.

I had no idea what we were doing or getting into, but we were like, hey, this is great, and boy they are cute, so let's do this. So we went starting down that beautiful river, I think it was a green river, and we had heard that the rapids could be pretty, pretty scary, but we weren't too worried because at one point that river was so slow and so low that we had to get out and walk and lift the raft.  That's how low it was in places...

So we were kind of caught unawares thinking. So what rapids? Yeah, I'm really scared. So we get farther down the way. And in the meantime, one of the guys there, David Joe had told us, he said, hey, if we get into trouble and we're thinking fat chance, if we get into trouble with the rapids, make sure you stay in the boat and be paddle, whatever you do.

And we're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. I love his hair.

So we were going down the river and it started to get a little more full and a little more dicey and it was getting a little bit exciting. And then we approached a rapid called aptly named skull rabbits. Now you think this would've been an indicator for us to be aware that this may not have been a time for us to figure out what the. Hey! We were doing river rafting, but alas, time had passed and the moment was upon us, so we hit into this skull rapids and I'm telling you what. It was dicey and people are not. We, my friend and I are in the front of the raft.

Not a good place to be when you don't know what you're doing. We start going down into these rapids and they were bad and we were rocking and going up and down and we're trying to hold on for everything. We've got just like you said, stay in the boat and then we hit this big rapid and all of a sudden we could feel the raft was lighter and my friend and I turned around and looked behind us and everybody else was out of the boat.

The other four people, we're the only ones left in the raft and I remember this moment of absolute fear and I looked at her and I said, what do we do?  And she looked at me and she said, and I said at the same time, paddle. So what we did is we paddle paddle, paddle. That's what we did. And we paddled and we try to go around and pick people up and we paddled and paddle and paddle. It's more and one of them, David. Joe was down under there a long, long, long time.

Even when you think, wow, that was a long time and it wasn't. It was a long time. Even he looked quite shook when he came, came to and he was an avid sports person. So the point being is that when life is hard and you're hitting those skull rapids, then remember, stay in the boat, be true to what you know, be true to what has kept you solid before.

So stay in the boat of those truths and values. And then paddle, paddle, paddle, paddle. Because eventually you'll come out of those rapids if you keep paddling. So when life gets tough, just keep moving forward the best. You know how? If you need to take a minute or an hour or a day to stay under the covers, do it, but then get the paddle and paddle and do the very best you know how with what you have in front of you and ask for help if you need, but just remember, keep paddling.

Alright. Sounds like a finding email kind of thing. That should have been in there. All right.

Have a wonderful day and hopefully you've been able to be helped by this little boost and come on back for some more and remember you've got this with back to basics.