Into the Wild

Alaska has always been one of the world’s last frontiers for adventurers.  For generations and for different reasons, men have hurled themselves at its wild interior, often paying the ultimate price for doing so.   One such man was a part time doctor and full time adventurer named Lukas Grobler.

I met Lukas in May 2009.  He visited our church on Easter Sunday and immediately turned heads – though mostly those of the women amongst us.  Lukas was a striking man with an imposing build.  To best describe him I steal verbatim from F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby":

“He had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.  It faced – or seemed to face – the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour.  It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey”

I’ve met tough and adventurous people in my time though none of them come close to Lukas.  He always went big and moreover, did things in style.  Before a brief spell in general surgery at one of Durban’s hospitals, he had completed an unsupported winter traverse of Southern Greenland with a Norwegian companion.  He was also an aspiring bow hunter and keen horseback rider.  Lukas was fastidious about food and baulked at anything that even remotely resembled a short cut in the kitchen.  I remember him once taking 24 hours to roast a leg of lamb and then forbidding his guests to bring any form of snack to dinner for fear of it spoiling their appetites.  Instead he laid on a perfectly grilled kudu loin which he sliced so thinly you could almost see the sunset through the pieces.  In short, he was a man who knew how to suck the marrow out of life.

But back to Alaska.  As far as I’ve been able to work out, Lukas and his Norwegian companion Olaf Schjoll had their sights set on an un-supported trek across the inhospitable northern part of the country.  The journey would start at the Canadian border and end 1600 kilometers away on the shores of the Bering Sea, a stone’s throw from the eastern tip of Siberia.  Between them lay the formidable Brooks Range, a 1000-mile mountain chain that, according to Wikipedia, has only been traversed by a handful of people.  Intending to live almost entirely off the land, the pair set off on June 21 equipped only with  as much food as they could carry, fishing tackle and Browning hunting rifle.  A photograph taken on June 20th shows Lucas in characteristic pose; standing astride the border separating Alaska and Canada, larger than life and looking like a modern day Grizzly Adams.

With the aid of a satellite device, Schjoll kept a meticulous blog in which he described the hills, rivers flora and fauna as well as the escalating hardships that came with the hostile terrain and inclement sub-Antarctic weather.  

On July 15th, he bemoaned the constant hunger and resulting loss of weight: 

“…we are starting to get terribly thin…we must have more food in one way or another!”

On July 17th, he described the mood between himself and Lukas as “sharp” remarking that they had argued on a number of issues.  

On July 20th, they discovered a ramshackle cabin and a modest stash of expired food.  The owner, it seems, had not been there since 2006.  Thanks to this small mercy they lived the good life for a few days, drawing from the cabin’s stash and augmenting it with trout caught in a nearby lake.  For a brief moment, a certain joy returned to the journey though Schjoll wrote, “I realize that the idea of self-sufficient trip has failed badly”.  

Two days later they celebrated Lukas’ birthday.

Friday July 27:  I stared at Schjoll's blog post in disbelief. 

“There is no easy way to say this: the expedition through the Brooks Range stopped yesterday, when Lukas Grobler died after a fall from a mountain cliff, into a river, Atigun Gorge”

A brief article on the Reuters newswire confirmed that the accident had occurred on Wednesday 25th July about 400 kilometres southeast of the town of Barrow and that Schjoll had used a satellite telephone to call for help.  It went on to say that the US Coast Guard found Lukas' body about a mile downstream from where he had fallen.

I hurried over to Lukas’ Facebook wall – already littered with condolences - more already than I was prepared to count.  The mood was (and still is at the time of this writing) one of complete sorrow and disbelief.  Someone had posted a picture of Rembrandt’s masterpiece “The Return of the Prodigal Son”.  The caption read: 

“As we mourn today, angels rejoice! Lukas Cornel Grobler is home with the Father!”

It was Lukas’ favourite Bible story and he spoke of it often during the brief time we knew him.  “Sometimes I’m the son – sometimes I’m the brother” – he would say.  He was an avid reader of anything written by C.S. Lewis - and perhaps because of this, someone had posted Brooke Fraser’s  hauntingly beautiful “C.S.  Lewis Song”:

If I find in myself desires nothing in this world can satisfy,

I can only conclude that I was not made for here…

For we, we are not long here

Our time is but a breath, so we better breathe it

Lucas isn't the first to succumb to the perils of the Alaskan Wilderness.  But it's hard to imagine that any of her victims influenced as many as he did in his short life.

Farewell Lukas.  You certainly made the most of the breath you had.  And though we only knew you a short time you left your mark. 

 Onwards!  Upwards!  Higher!

The Atigun Gorge where Lukas died

You are not in control

In 1998 adventurer Bear Grylls became one of the youngest people ever to climb Mt Everest.  When asked how it felt to have conquered the world's highest mountain, he said: 

“I didn’t conquer Everest:  Everest allowed me to crawl up the one side and stay on the peak for a few minutes”

I read these words while taking a six-day break last week in Zimbabwe.  Zim is hardly a paragon of stability – in fact if you were an expatriate you might accurately describe it as a “hardship post”.  No one – rich or poor - banks on having running water and the electricity supply is similarly tenuous. Yet strangely many have adapted to this.  Residential properties in the more affluent suburbs almost always boast a bore-hole (or at very least some form of water storage system) as well as a generator.  Such people show that managing instability and unpredictability, at least to a point, is possible. 

But there is a point beyond which the illusion of control wears thin.  Where the forces that ultimately determine the extent of one’s wellbeing are just too titanic, unrelenting and malignant to counteract  with one’s resources.

From the vantage point of this relatively un-newsworthy third world nation, I reflected on some of the things that were making world headlines.  The Euro Zone Crisis, stubbornly impervious to any form of intervention.  The worsening relations between Turkey and Syria and the new leadership in Egypt - both with the potential to profoundly impact the global power balance.  And what about global warming?  Seriously, much as I try to do my bit, will my meagre contributions matter in the long run?  Not while America and China keep farting stuff into the atmosphere the way they do.

I found myself pondering this amidst the stoical majesty of Domboshawa Hill, an impressive granite monolith forged umpteen years ago by forces either too ancient or complex to describe here.  And with respect to those headlines, I sensed the powerlessness that the poet Wilfred Owen felt in the face of the “monstrous anger” of World War I:

“It seemed that out of battle I escaped

Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped

Through granites which titanic wars had groined”

Suddenly I felt like an ant tenuously treading the delicate meniscus of a puddle, aware that at any second the surface tension could give way.  Similar to the indebtedness Bear Grylls felt towards Mt Everest, I felt more keenly than ever that my place on this mountain called Life is more an outcome of divine permission and goodness than anything else.

“Now listen, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.  Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.  Instead, you ought to say, "If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that."

James 4: 13 to 15

How I lost 10 years of my life

When I was 24 I ended up in a bad relationship.  I say, “ended up” as though it was something that just happened to me.  The reality is I went in with both eyes open.  The girl in question was 2 months pregnant having rebounded from a highly volatile and misguided relationship with another man.  Though two family members questioned whether it would work, I blundered on regardless, imagining I could make more of the faulty building material than others could.   In short, I would be the exception to the rule.

2 weeks after my 25th birthday, the child was born and I became a de facto dad.  We got married 18 months later.   3 years after that; the marriage was on the rocks and in April 2001, it went uncontested to the divorce courts.  It was only in 2003 that I could truly say I’d re-discovered the path I was meant to be on in the first place and with it, the will to really live again.  In all, nearly 10 years of my life had swirled heedlessly down the plughole amidst a fog of aimless conflict and bitterness.

I had some part to play in it all.  I was quick tempered and at times, a certifiable arsehole.  Also, In believing the fraught foundations could sustain the weight of a lifelong partnership, I had reduced the thing to a simplistic, weak-willed cocktail of noble intentions and romantic illusions.

“The prudent see danger and take refuge – but the simple keep going and suffer for it” 

– Proverbs 27: 12

The other night Lisa and I watched a series of challenging talks by Andy Stanley on the topic of life’s destinations.  The central message Stanley calls “The Principle of the Path”: good intentions are always trumped by the path in life you choose – your direction determines your destination not your good intentions.  

“You can have a plan for a beach holiday in Miami, you can pile your car high with swimming gear and surfboards – but if you go north on I 85 instead of south you won’t be having a beach holiday anytime soon”

We were suitably chastened by this.  How much are we basing our direction in life on the theoretical compass bearing of a well-intentioned wish list rather than on concrete actions that actually lead to the desired destination?  How often do we take on the practical, hard-as-nails challenge of marrying action with sentiment?  Are we viewing everyday life critically enough to identify the hidden traps and pitfalls that might take us off the path?

We watched Andy’s DVD with a couple who has recently lost everything in a bad business deal and who are having to make a fresh start.  The wife insisted they’d seen the DVD before.  The husband had no recollection of it and wondered why.  “Because it was 2 years ago and everything was hunky dory back then”.  Paul wrote in his first letter to the Corinthians:  “if you think you are standing strong, be careful not to fall”

Mercifully many of the intangibles I lost through the winnowing process of divorce have been restored to me and I am living an abundant life.   This is thanks to my precious wife Lisa and the God of Grace who presides over our marriage.  

But the Principle of the Path remains a chilling warning nonetheless.

Are Winners Overrated?

 “History is written by the Victors,” said Winston Churchill and few of us would disagree. 

Indeed, this would apply not just to history but also to popular culture where a minority of front-runners set the pace and who the rest of us – at least for the most part - look up to and often seek to emulate.  But what gives society’s “winners” (apart from the permission we give them) the special privilege and prerogative to set the bar the way they do?

Yesterday I watched the movie “Moneyball”, a biographical drama about baseball visionary Billy Beane.  As general manager of the Oakland Athletics, Beane is the guy who scouts for and selects the best baseball talent that the club’s money can buy.  In 2002, faced with severe budgetary constraints (relative to teams like the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox), he joined forces with a Yale economics graduate to develop an entirely new way of looking at player selection. 

“The problem with baseball”, asserts his brainy side-kick, “is that clubs buy players when they should be buying wins”.  His hypothesis was that while richer clubs were spending large sums of money on superstars – big hitters, base stealers, the guys who create theatre and build match attendance – a large pool of less explosive but nonetheless competent players  (overlooked for a variety of biased reasons and perceived flaws) were readily available at a lower price.   And so while the club could no longer afford superstars like Johnny Damon and Jason Giambi, it could conceivably “recreate” their influence on the field through a composite of lower profile players.

And so Beane and Brand set about creating a team from, as the latter refers to it, “an island of misfit toys”.  A 37-year-old batting legend past his prime and with less than a year of baseball left in him.  An injured catcher who could no longer excel in his former position but who could bat and keep first base.  A little known pitcher with a highly unorthodox throwing style.  In short, the breakthrough for a cash-strapped club like the Oakland A’s, lay in looking at performance stats from an entirely different angle.  But would it work?

The record reflects that the A’s had the longest winning streak in Baseball history that year – 20 straight wins.  All this at a cost of 250 000 payroll dollars per game while the Yankees were paying over $1.2m apiece for their victories.  It was an extraordinary achievement – one that earned Beane a job offer from the Red Sox worth $12.5m.  Satisfied with being the guy who had turned Baseball selection upside down, he stayed with Oakland.  But In 2004 the Red Sox – who had swiftly embraced Beane’s selection philosophy, broke an 86-year World Series drought.  I was in Boston when it happened – an eye-witness to a euphoria that might have rivaled the end of two World Wars combined.  Two days after the win, 5 million Bostonians lined the city’s streets to welcome their beloved team back from St Louis.

So maybe history isn’t exclusively written by the victors.  Yet such examples are so few and far between that we’re unlikely to see things differently for some time to come.  In the corporate world alone, we’re surrounded by organisations that approach people management the way rich baseball clubs did back in 2001.  To say nothing of flawed education systems and top-heavy, self-interested governmental policy.  The result is almost always the same – the orthodox talent rises to the top while the rarer yet quieter strengths are slowly suffocated before being ejected from the system entirely.

In honour of his achievements and the lesson he has taught me, I dedicate Apple’s legendary advertisement to Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane.

"The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry!"

Almost everyone that I meet these days complains of being too busy.  

After 35 years of incarceration in Shawshank Prison, Brooks Hatlen is released on probation and, on his first day as a free man, is nearly run down by a motor car - (something which hadn't been invented before he was imprisoned).  "The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry" - he writes to his buddies still on the inside.

It's great to be busy with the right stuff - but when things swing out of control it can be no laughing matter.  Just today I chatted to an engineer friend of mine who works in one of our biggest shopping centres.  He's been sick with the flu for nearly 3 weeks and working insanely late hours on top of that - so much so in fact that he's never home in time to tuck in the kids.  When it comes to rest and recuperation, his weekends don't even come close to touching sides.  

On Thursday, I had a whirlwind catch-up with a mate who was leaving that evening for 6 days holiday in Cape Town.  He reckoned he'd be chained to his laptop for at least three of those.  "Why?" I asked.  Turns out his team has been stripped down to the bone and the company he works for won't staff up.  So it's nose to the grindstone for him it would seem - with very little light at the end of the tunnel.

Work is a funny thing - (OK, not so funny a lot of the time) - when you don't have enough you get miserable and when you have too much you are so strung out that the money hardly seems worth it. 

How do we reconcile remuneration with the often overlooked spiritual purpose behind work?  They are two very different things and balancing them often proves as challenging as a game of Jenga.

Stephen da Silva in his book "Money and the Prosperous Soul" makes the critical distinction between work and toil.  The latter is to work extremely hard or incessantly.  More than this, it is an "oppressive spiritual force" which separates work from its spiritual purpose and drives away the other vital activities necessary for maintaining our connection to God and his purpose for us.

"We have embraced slavery under toil.  Not surprisingly this is linked to our slavery to debt, for our financial obligations demand that we work under toil"

Rest, says Da Silva is critical in striking the balance.  So much so in fact that God, after freeing his people from Egypt - prescribed the Sabbath not just for prayer and study but for recreation too.  In fact, until that point, no ancient society observed a day of rest like the Jews did.  

I am not about to make a law about the Sabbath itself - but I cannot help but feel that we are still required to pay the price for real recreation - yes the price - because leisure time and recreation costs - not just monetarily but in the effort and courage required to leave our gilded cells. 

"Below the surface of the commandment is the understanding that leisure is appropriate to a free people -  Leisure is conducive to freedom - and freedom is necessary for dreaming.  Without dreaming, our creativity, by which we bring solutions, beauty and all else that makes our world better, is shut down"

"Inception": best wake up call of 2012

“If we could just stay awake, perhaps we might see our way to living our dreams”

“Aren’t you worried”, my grandmother once asked me, “that with all the films you watch you’re going to lose your grip on reality?”  The comment incensed me though with hindsight, I’m prepared to concede that she may have had a point.  Indeed, her remark held special significance in light of the film I watched on Sunday afternoon.

Inception is the ludicrously successful sci-fi film which tells the story of a team of con men who infiltrate the world of dreams to influence outcomes in the real world.  I’d resisted watching the film because it seemed so ridiculously over-hyped.  On Sunday however, I gave in and, after viewing it once, took the dogs for a walk and then watched it again.  It was that good.  But you probably know that already.

Not since The Matrix and Fight Club have I been so preoccupied with a movie – I daresay I could write several posts about it (and may yet).  I left for work on Monday utterly stupefied by Inception’s brilliance, troubled by its subtle warnings and even mildly paranoid with the prospect that I might not have as firm a grip on reality as I’d once thought.

Though I may exist in the “real” world, do my dreams and (as the Apostle Paul calls them) “vain imaginations” inveigle me into a world that is somehow alien and at times even at odds with the world I am called to live in?  As T.E. Lawrence wrote in the 7 Pillars of Wisdom:

“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity…”

One of the film’s haunting sub-plots deals with the failure of the hero’s wife to adjust to reality after a blissful 5 decades of “building” a dream world with her husband.  And what a world it is!  We get glimpses of it in the movie’s final throes as we are literally washed up on the shores of Cobb and Mal’s subconscious – and then carried away on a sweeping bypass of a vast and impossibly magnificent cliff-side city.  As the camera turns inland, we behold a skyline quite unlike any other we have ever known or even dreamt of.  This cityscape – though thoroughly gossamer and without foundation, is Mal’s reality.  It is here she must return to – even if it means jumping from her hotel window to achieve the “kick” that will jolt her back to that place.

Yet this world and all its beauty are caught in the relentless undertow of decay.  The great canyons that separate the fantastical skyscrapers are a moldering ruin of cracks, debris and floodwater.  In one dramatic sequence, we see the palisade condominiums peeling off in vast chunks into the swirling ocean below.  “For this world in its present form is passing away,” warns the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians.

In the “Great Divorce”, C.S. Lewis ambitiously tackles the challenge of describing the landscape of heaven.  Thought by many to contain his best use of fable and allegory, the book invites us into a spectacular world whose very foundation is Absolute Truth.  Here, at least to the unsanctified visitor, even a tiny blade of grass is as hard and sharp as a shard of high tensile steel.  In this uncompromising world, even the raindrops of a brief summer downpour have the shredding power of a million machine gun bullets.  The message is simple: reality and Truth are as hard as nails.  They are Unyielding, uncompromising and oftentimes stoically inconvenient.

While I believe that having dreams is an essential part of living out my purpose, is there perhaps a fine line which, when crossed, gives way to indulgent and aimless fantasy?  When I have crossed this line, am I still able to face reality and its frigid insistence on the facts?  Lawrence of Arabia appears to have felt strongly about this.  Having dealt with what he called “the dreamers of the night”, he turned his attention to the “dangerous men” of reality:

“… but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”

What checks and balances to do you use to keep your grip on reality?

The One Thing You Need to know

Photo courtesy of TheDominican.net

It’s been a busy week.  The modern day marketing process has become, rightly or wrongly, a most time consuming and arduous process.  At times even an unpleasant one.  

Still, the week wasn’t all heavy going.  I was blessed to end five consecutive days of daylong workshops sipping red wine with an old friend around a roaring fire in his Houghton home.  Amongst many other things, we discussed the busyness of life inside the big companies we serve.  

“It’s interesting”, my friend observed, “that given all the stress and running around, the average supermarket looks no different to what it looked like 15 years ago.  Sure, there’s nothing really wrong with them but the process of buying my household essentials seems no better, easier or different than it used to be”

I think he has half a point.  There may be more products – and some of them are improvements on what we used to get – but in general, the end result always seems to belie the undeniable increase in the stress, politics, nervous energy, endless meetings and late hours that went into producing it.

By the way, there is one exception when it comes to retail – not just when it comes to choice but to the sheer sensory dimension of the aisles.  I speak of The Food Lovers Market – a treasure trove of beautifully merchandised products from both our own and foreign shores – wines, baked goods, sauces, spices, confectionary to name but a few.  A place where, contrary to the mainstream chains, the fresh produce department actually lives up to its name and then some. 

I wouldn’t go so far as to say the owners of Food Lovers are lazy – far from it - but the fruit of their labour (if you’ll excuse the pun) is in a quantum sense disproportionate to the work that goes in.  The whole operation is a single-minded conspiracy of delighting shoppers with a wide array of fresh food choices and experiences at a competitive price.

A few years ago Marcus Buckingham published “The one thing you need to know” – a great book which insists that at the heart of most phenomena (this could include your job, your marriage, your parenting strategies and yes, even your relationship with God) lies a single yet controlling insight.  Lose sight of this “one thing” and all of your best efforts at managing, leading or individual achievement will be diminished.  Says Buckingham:

“Keep mindful of the one thing, understand all of its ramifications, orient your decisions around it, and you will act with far greater power and effectiveness”

But we have become wary of the one big thing.  Despite the stress we live under, we feel somehow incensed or short-changed when someone suggests an easier way.  In spite of our discomforts, we exchange the quiet yet focused composure of the OR for life in the ER.

What is the one thing you need to know in order to claw back the elegant yet pragmatic simplicity of life?