I'm not a kayak girl

"Am I boring now?" and other thoughts

Last weekend, we went kayaking. M. has made this an annual tradition for his co-workers, and I enjoy watching him in his element, taking easy charge of the group and helping them navigate the water, seeing him paddle back and forth among them with ease, chatting with them and their families.

It was a perfect day: low 70s, semi-cloudy, breezy enough that I started the trip in long sleeves. It wasn’t blazing hot, there was no sunscreen melting off my body at an alarming pace, and the water wasn’t extremely high or fast. In other words, perfect conditions for the less-hardcore among us.

I would love to say with 100% certainty that I am a kayak girl, but I am not. I want to be the kind of person who loves it, who’s ready to drop everything at a moment’s notice to get out on the water, but I am not. I am a semi-reluctant person with a partner who loves it, and I do it enough that I have my own kayak, life vest, and water shoes. And while this may easily seem like it’s making its way to becoming an anti-kayak essay, it’s not. Just stick with me here.

The river has so many variables: low or high, fast or slow, clear or clogged, warm or cold, choppy or still. All these variables collide in my brain when I’m on the water, as I try to run normal threat assessments to determine the best skillset to use that day. And because I have anxiety brain, even when things are relatively calm and conditions are nearly perfect, I’m already anticipating the next challenge, the next obstacle: will it be a downed tree blocking a narrow part of the river? Will a freshly-fallen branch with lots of vegetation catch the bottom of my kayak and flip me over? Will that current push me into a tree? Will I get stuck on the rocks in the shallows? Will there be snakes? (Yes. Yes, there will be snakes.)

That’s to say nothing of paddling strategy, which must change with your conditions. I’m pretty well-versed in it, though not exactly one who moves through it with ease. I can speed up, slow down, back up, and turn around. I can steer well enough to weave in and out of a group, even if my execution lacks grace. But everything I know goes out the door when I get caught in a small current, and I find myself paddling like hell against it — an absolute act of futility.

As I floated along yesterday, I was thinking about all of this, and hating it. Specifically, I hated that it was such an on-the-nose metaphor for my usually in-control self. It felt like an indictment on my need for control. That’s what kayaking is all about, in a way: control. Specifically, the need to relinquish it. It means, then, that you are not using your tools and powers of observation as a way to impose order on the river (good luck with that!), but rather, you let the river lead and you respond to it.

In a world where most of my time is spent imposing order, it can be difficult to be in a situation where I am floating along, totally at the mercy of something else. It didn’t feel relaxing in the same way as, say, lying on a beach might. To my credit, I worked to center and ground myself to stay present, though my technique admittedly felt a little off. There were a few times that I let out large psychological sigh exhales, only to realize that it was because I was inadvertently holding my breath. This only reinforced a concept that was glaringly obvious at this point: I am really, really not good at letting go of control.

Moments like this remind me about the gap between who I am (or who I think I am) with who I want to be, or who I think I should be. In my head, I picture several selves facing off, like that Spiderman meme.

Later that night, we watched “Hit Man,” the new Netflix movie with Glen Powell. It was a little wild, a little funny, and enjoyable overall (Powell’s alter egos are very entertaining). The gist is this: Powell’s character, Gary Johnson, is a philosophy professor who gigs part-time as a fake contract killer for local police. A woman in an abusive marriage tries to contract him to unalive her husband, and he ends up falling for her. Chaos ensues.

Toward the beginning of the movie, there was a conversation that stuck out to me. Gary is talking with his ex-wife. She argues people can change their personality well into adulthood; he’s not so sure. That becomes a throughline for the movie — can people change? How much? Is it authentic?

I think it is, or at least, it can be. I don’t remember younger me having the same kind of preoccupation with (or even awareness of) control. Or maybe I did — it just expressed itself in a different way. Most of my early-to-mid 20s were a little wild and unmoored. I embraced experience for experience’s sake, was less concerned with risk or consequence. I also had less stability, less responsibility — in other words, less things to screw up. There is some romance in that era that I long for sometimes — not the recklessness, but the idea that things were more malleable, less fixed, and more free.

Fast forward to a demanding job, family, and all the responsibilities that entails — things that require some level of stability and more calculated risk-taking. Does that mean I’m boring now? Maybe. Probably not. Isn’t the whole point of life experiencing things so that you know what you like and what you don’t like? Isn’t the point of that to do more of what you do like, and to stop spending time on things you don’t?

I don’t know if I’ll ever become a kayak girl. Probably not, and that’s okay. But I’ll go a few times a year, try to ground myself in the present moment. And maybe there is an opportunity to meet in the middle. To try and be present. To stop focusing on complete control. To soften a boundary. To loosen, to open to opportunity, to experience.