Many years ago, while I was working as a chaplain for a mental health facility that worked with children, we would take a group of clients on a trip to canoe, camp, and fish in the Boundary Waters Wilderness in Northern Minnesota. One year, on the last day of our week-long trip, we were traveling to the spot where our outfitter was going to pick us up. We were competing with a deadline for pickup, and were traveling a long way. I was sharing my canoe with a young lady from our addictions treatment program. A terrible storm was bearing down on us, and we were hurrying. We reached a short portage, where it didn’t make sense to unload the boat entirely, so the client and I agreed to carry it the short distance overland. The boat was heavy, the ground was a mix of mud and tripping hazards, the sky was black, and this portage was clouded with mosquitoes. We were struggling with the weight, slipping, tripping, and trying to ignore the dozens of mosquitoes that settled on every inch of exposed skin. About halfway through our miserable portage, the young lady I was with threw down the canoe in frustration and began yelling about how she wouldn’t go any further because the situation was too miserable. I have often thought about that moment and wondered if she understood that her decision meant that she would be staying in that muddy, mosquito-filled spot longer. By getting frustrated and quitting, she prolonged our stay.
Life can often be a little like that portage. It can be fraught with difficult moments, where we are tired, surrounded by folks who are biting us, where the sky is black, and the pressure just makes us want to stop and not work our way forward. Whether it’s a tough patch in marriage, our work, or any other part of our lives, it’s often tempting to sit in the mud and do nothing. The problem is that choosing to stop means we are stuck. Winston Churchill once said: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” The idea being that if you stop, you are stopping and staying in hell. Though frustration may make it seem as though our difficulties are never ending, it rarely proves to be the case. In fact, typically, giving up has the psychological effect of making things seem worse.
On that portage, I dealt with the situation by breaking down the process into smaller bits. I explained that we could not stop. The only thing to do was pick up the boat. Then I urged the young lady to take a step. Then another. There are times when our discouragement over the whole situation we are facing makes it seem impossible. In those instances, the best you can do is break everything down into its smallest parts and accomplish the next little thing. In AA, this is often described as taking one day at a time. The idea is that we cannot stay sober forever, it’s too much. Staying sober today is the goal. Sometimes it’s necessary to make it even smaller. An hour or a minute is sometimes the only thing we can deal with. The same is true of our hard seasons. Getting out of bed, having the next conversation, making the next payment, or whatever else we need to do is the trick to getting off the trail and back on the water. When dealing with overwhelming difficulties, it’s sometimes necessary to break them down into the next little step.
