What the Woods Taught Me About Confusion

If you’re committed to living a life that is true to who you are, there’s a good chance you’re going to experience the symptom of confusion along the way.  I define confusion as cognitive dissonance - the mental discomfort felt when holding two or more contradictory beliefs, values, or ideas, resulting in behavior that doesn’t match belief systems.

In my early years at the campground I experienced frequent confusion. Someone saw a kayak that I saw as blue, as yellow, or a flower I saw as orange, they saw as white. Someone said they’d be here on Tuesday, they arrived on Wednesday. 

I wondered if I was “off centre”, unbalanced, unstable, or just plain wrong when I experienced the world in a different way than somebody else. 

I sought resolution between “pencil pushers don’t know hard work” and “I don’t have to work hard because I have a brain” and “maybe I actually like working hard (but why would I? That doesn’t make any sense!)  At the top of the food chain, misaligning all these behaviors with belief systems was the value I placed on money. It was driving all this confusion. 

But knowing that only took me so far.

Luckily, or ironically, caretaking for the campground commands no less than self trust and  stability to be successful. There are annual checks and balances that are high stakes, high risk, and high reward. I use these as guide posts to determine if  I’m still equipped to do what I’m doing here. Fortunately, a symptom of doing this is self trust. 

One checkpoint is taking the floating docks out of the water. Three of the docks, in the deepest water,  are held in place by 4, 21 foot steel pipes. The pipes protect the docks from floating away if the river rises, and holds them in place while the pressure of the river current pushes on them for for the 5-6 months they’re in the water. 

The first pipe is always the hardest to get out. After not having done it for an entire year, my body and brain need to remember how to work together to get the technique and the mechanics down. 

The first step is to loosen the pipe from whatever kind of river bottom it landed it in when it was speared through the hole custom designed for the very purpose of housing the steel pipe. I tighten the pipe wrench at thigh height,  and turn it a couple full rotations to loosen it from the mud or sand that it’s stuck in, then pull up on the wrench with all my strength. It rarely comes free on the first pull.

When it comes free, I take a break. It takes a lot of physical strength to get it out of the ground.  I need to be at full strength for the next step, which is lifting that 21 foot pole straight in the air and out of the hole. This is a surprisingly easy thing to do, but it’s made difficult by the slime that forms on the pipe over the summer. 

It just gets too slippery to pull out by putting one hand in front of the other one armlength at a time to remove it. To prevent it from sliding through my gloves, and back to the bottom,  I hold the pipe in place with one gloved hand squeezed tightly on a slime-free section, wipe off about one foot of vertical slime with a bath towel, grip the clean section with my other hand, bring my other hand down to join it, and pull it up another 3 feet. Repeat 7 times. 

The gloves for this job have to be right. I use a pair of 3M insulated ones that I don’t really like. They’re the right ones for this job, though. They’re a little too big, but the grip they form on the slippery wet steel gives me the confidence I need to get the pipe out of the water.

There’s about 18 vertical inches to work with when I get to the bottom of the pipe. The final thrust is the most important one, and by this time my legs and body are shaking from the strength and will required to get this far. I lean the top in the direction I want it to fall,  rest it on my body, bend my knees,  and lift up, ensuring the bottom of the pipe exits the hole in the opposite direction it has to fall. 

When it hits the dock with a loud bang, I feel immense relief and confidence for having done this.

It took a lot of seasons for my internal nature to harmonize with mother nature. May you trust your intuition, be fully committed, and inordinately stubborn to claim your birthright - the freedom to be who you are.