a jump in the lake

This blog was headed for disaster.

When I was a kid—when I was a little kid—when I was 5 years old I would tell my mom stories. She would write them down, I would draw in the pictures, and we would create little books together about an 8-year-old boy who sailed the high seas in a 3-masted wooden sailboat saving princesses from pirates and seeking buried treasure. Not incidentally, this boy was named Ned. My name, at the time, was not Ned, but that’s another story…

Throughout grade school my authorly aspirations grew and blossomed, and up until a short time before college my intention was to be a writer. In high school, however, this goal was supplanted by the belief that I would be most effective at saving the world (princesses being recruited to help) though a career in science, perhaps the development of a good 5-cent contraceptive or a renewable source of energy.

This belief collapsed.

The further I went in science and eventually medicine, the less I believed that progress in these areas correlated to that of humanity or the world. Instead, and nowhere more vividly than in the time I spent in the Peace Corps in South Africa, I saw the overwhelming effect of a world divided between the haves and the have-nots. Divided, and inextricably linked, as the labor of the poor provided the wealth of the rich. It was not so much that technological progress was the enemy as that it was too often used as another tool of the powerful to consolidate their power.

Along the way I was fortunate to meet the real Dr. Hunter “Patch” Adams. Here was a human being who had dedicated his life to the betterment of life on the planet. But his message to me was so much more important, so much more meaningful, than one of responsibility. His message was one of joy.

“If you need a break,” Patch says, “I want you to take one that day. I don’t want you working under stress. We look at teachers, nurses, doctors, social workers, and we say, ‘Why would I ever want to do that?’” Patch wants us to make a life of revolution the most attractive, fun life imaginable.

Which is why, when the inspiration struck me at age 30 to create a children’s book, I was excited. Here was a chance to have loads of fun doing something meaningful, and something that took me full-circle back to my childhood dreams of authorship.

The other part of this was that I worried that if I ever sat down and tried to write prose, what would come out wouldn’t be joyful. It wouldn’t be fun, or funny. It would be yet another painful, wordy, semi-autobiographical first novel that might, if you were lucky, leave you pissed off at the state of the world.

What I hadn’t realized is that this blog was becoming that novel.

Today, my day off from work and best chance to write, I struggled to feel creative, to create. The bitter cold outside didn’t help. At the end of the day I had a painful, wordy novel, and I felt pissed off at the state of the world.

And then I remembered Patch Adams, and my commitment to not take any of this so seriously, and I decided to go jump in the lake.

Omak Lake on a 43-degree day is no bath. The freezing jolt to the system was exactly what I needed. After jumping in, getting out, and jumping back in twice more, breathing was painful and my skin tingled from head to toe: I was alive. This blog, and the life it reflects, were averted from disaster, despair, and all the rest of the melancholy I’ve been dwelling in recently.

If this becomes more that an occasional trip, of course, it could start getting really cold…but hey, there’s always snow rolling!