Someone needs a challenge

Some things just tip the scales. It's like a switch is flipped and it's on. Whatever it is. For me after reading about St. Onge and his crazy life growing up traveling around the world on a boat I've been feeling itchy feet. Truth be told I've been feeling this way for a while now. I just don't know how to shut off my extreme desire to be away from here - here being my work, this city this whole life experience that I have day to day. I miss traveling to far flung places, not knowing what's going to happen next and pushing myself to the outer edge of what I think is possible. But what I miss most is how amazing I feel when I return. How everything is better because I have what would amount to a "forced" perspective. It's like shaking an Etch-A-Sketch. The lines that I've drawn in the sand tumble to the bottom then the top, rearranging themselves into a non form. I'm free to drawn anything.

Let's face it, most people could use a vacation. Time away is time we don't usually have - a chance to be something other than your job or your family. No one knows you and no one cares. For me that is levity. A true escape.

So now my question arises...what am I trying to escape from?

The easy answer would be I'm not. I know myself to be a fuller, more open version of my self when I travel. I am overtly friendly, confident and easy to connect with. I like that. But I feel like, with all the things that way me down here I can never be exactly that. I need to have the time to breath.

A couple years ago I climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro in Africa. It was no small feat. It was grueling and ultimately left me with swollen toes with minimal feeling in them. It came back, the feeling, but while climbing that mountain I promised myself that I would be true to how I feel when I'm climbing. I find this almost impossible here.

So maybe it is a manufactured escape. One where I know I can be a fuller me and that matters more than worrying about the why of it.

Change your world idea, change your mind

From time to time I read a story or an article in the paper that really gets me thinking. Earlier today, (I had the morning off) I read a story in the New York Times about the skier Ryan St. Onge who's hoping to compete in the Vancouver Olympics.

"Ryan has traveled to every continent except Antarctica, filling his passport three times over. He has competed in the Olympics, obtained his pilot’s license and nearly completed his bachelor’s degree in finance. His next adventure: qualifying for the Olympics in Vancouver.

His family does not plan. It hatches an idea, earns the necessary money and launches boats into oceans or bodies onto ski ramps.

His family is not rich. His brother works in real estate, his mother in accounting. His father, who has been a concert producer and a busker, strumming his guitar on downtown street corners for spare change, sometimes says simply, “I’m in boats.” One month, they had $43 to spend on food, so they survived on boiled and grilled hot dogs.

Three generations share the same philosophy. Ryan’s grandfather took his children skiing or sailing every weekend, lived for 15 years on a boat in the Bahamas and imparted the family code.

“Life isn’t about multiplication tables,” Cary St. Onge, Ryan’s father, said. “School is important, but it’s a tool. It’s not life. I tried to raise him to see what life was.”

In typical St. Onge fashion, Cary and his former wife, Sara, removed Ryan and his older brother, Chad, from school, leased their home and set sail for the Caribbean on a 42-foot boat named Elvin. Ryan was 8 years old; Chad was 10.

Every day was different. The boys learned to scuba dive and spear fish. They visited third world nations and finished their homework at sea. They took turns standing watch, alternating with their parents, day and night.

By the end of the voyage, each family member could have sailed the boat across an ocean. In fact, the boys completed several passages on their own, their parents watching as they hauled anchor, charted course, sailed the boat and anchored it.

The trip exposed them to different cultures, other ways of thinking. It made them stronger, more independent. Ryan St. Onge returned to school with long blond hair turned almost white and the darkest tan his classmates had seen.

“It completely changed who we were,” he said. “I can’t put my finger on exactly what happened, but it’s a huge part of who I am. I don’t ever want to live a normal life.”




You can read the entire article here :http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/sports/olympics/13freestyle.html

Man rescues wife trapped under earthquake rubble

American journalist Frank Thorp was six hours away from the capital of Port-au-Prince when he got a 'terrifying' ten-second phone call from his wife Jillian to say she was trapped under their concrete home in the city.It came minutes after a 7.0 quake ripped through the poor Caribbean nation, with thousands feared to have died after buildings collapsed all over the crowded capital.

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After a six-hour drive Mr Thorp got there to find the three-storey concrete house completely collapsed to ground level, with his wife still trapped underneath along with a colleague who works with her at a charity and members of her house staff.
He said: 'Some of the Haitian workers here had broken through the ceiling... I jumped into the hole and I was able to see her wave her hand.
'I couldn't see her whole body, she as just waving. I could hear her voice.'
He added: 'We had to pull brick after brick after brick and doors and metal away for at least an hour after to get her out.'

Although his wife was in good condition, her housekeeper had to have both her legs amputated.

The earthquake, followed by at least 30 aftershocks, was the biggest to hit the nation in 200 years and has left it in desperate need of help as the population was still struggling to recover from three hurricane strikes in 2008.