At the end of the rafting trip, we were lifted from the bottom of the canyon by helicopter. Two hours later, I sat at McCarran Airport, stunned by the incessant ding, ding, ding of slot machines, cascading coins, and dreams of a better life. I’d left the canyon, but the canyon never left me.
Related Quotes
The first time I rocked in the blue chair, it felt familiar. It felt like the kind of peace you find when floating in shallow water. It felt almost like sitting on my father’s lap. It comforted me like all the rocking chairs that had come before it. I rocked and rocked for hours. As I rocked, everything else seemed farther away, almost inaccessible: my desert room, my roommate playing video games on the other side of the door, the street below. Nowhere except the blue chair mattered. I wanted to rock forever.
When I came up gasping, my father grabbed me and tossed me back in. When I remember that day, I remember soaring through the air and landing with a splat. I remember myself unattached from everything and yet made of everything. I was the air and the water. I was made of living fragments. I was past, present, and future at once. I felt, more than ever before, and perhaps ever since, deliciously free.
Exploring that space between memories and the stories we create allows us to emerge as the leaders we were born to be. My journey as a leader has taught me that my childhood demanded a hypervigilance and that, to stay safe, I learned to work ceaselessly to try to make sense of the world (even as I was confronted with insensible acts and facts). As part of that effort, I listened closely—collecting and holding the stories of those around me as clues to a puzzling life.
The result is that I often see, hear, sense things that others miss. This can be a source of great wisdom. But this sensing can be an impediment to my peace of mind as well, for I can create whole ships of fiction out of the random flotsam and jetsam that float my way. Still, when I sit well and quietly, I can see a way through the puzzle, especially when another is blocked. I laugh as I recall that one of my favorite childhood pastimes was completing books of mazes. I like working my way out of mazes; I am good at it.
Money was safety. The pursuit of money, then, became a chase for safety and a flight from poverty, chaos, and the streets of my childhood.
As leaders, our task is to feel our way through the heartbreaking, fear-inducing roller-coaster rides, learning not to vomit with each rise and dip. Then, just as we’ve built up the resiliency needed to recover from each nauseating dip, we find that we no longer have the need for it. The little train that makes up the Cyclone comes to a stop and we finally, wisely, get off the ride.