In this place🚣

🛶 Keep your mind in the boat

Can you guess my new favorite non-cult related book? It’s The Boys in the Boat. You may have heard about it or seen the George Clooney film. If you only saw the movie, you missed out on a beautifully written book. Author Daniel James Brown is carrying me through the outrageously inspiring and tumultuous journey of the 1930’s rowing team who took the gold at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 - during Hitler’s reign. 

The beauty and complexity of this story dwells in the boys mantra:

🛶 Keep your mind in the boat.

The focus necessary for high level competitive rowing is extreme. The nine members of a crew must function with exquisite precision that is only possible when the mind of each individual is fully, as they say: IN THE BOAT. The slighted distraction, be it physical, mental, emotional or spiritual, is an impediment to the unison of motion that is high level competitive rowing. 

 💦 Several times while reading, I’ve been moved to tears by the wisdom and beauty of this sport and the obstacles and life lessons each of the man-boys have had to face in order to be in the boat. 

And which of them...had...the ability to disregard his own ambitions, to throw his ego over the gunwales, to leave it swirling in the wake of his shell, and to pull, not just for himself, not just for glory, but for the other boys in the boat. 

Al Ulbrickson, in The Boys in the Boat

But, alas, being who I am, I can’t help but notice the similarities between the ‘mind in the boat’ mentality and that imposed by a coercive controller. In fact, many extreme sports have an edge of coercion to them, don’t they? CTL, the group I was in for 18 years, promoted an “all in” mentality that I strived to uphold all those years. I was encouraged to use my dreamwork homework as an anchor through every moment of every day. But it was a red herring. And a decoy. 

✨ Where is the line between something so beautiful - like excelling at a graceful sport and an authoritarian doctrine that diminishes, defiles and dehumanizes? How do we know a healthy leader from a bad one? What is the line between healthy and harmful and what’s really going on when some people benefit and others are harmed?!

I’ve learned that these dynamics exist on a deeply personal, and often intimate level. Writing to Reckon creates opportunities to open up questions like these. Personal inquiry in a safe setting allows the mind and psyche to discover, uncover and recover.

But there’s one overarching question on this ‘mind in the boat’ theme, as my friend and mentor Kathleen reminded me: Who is it for?

🛶 For the boy in the boat I most identify with - Joe Rantz - there’s no doubt he was rowing for his life - for the pain and the glory of touching the divine. 💫 By surrendering his hard-earned and die-hard independence - he was graced with one of life’s greatest mysteries: if we humans are to glimpse our highest capacity, it’s through our utter dependence on each other.

This also presents us survivors of cultic control, one of our greatest conundrums, doesn’t it?

Please hit reply with your insights, questions and musings. Or register for a Writing to Reckon class today. 

Come write and see what you discover.