Risk and Reward (a.k.a. Passion-Gap Containers)

Why do we have hobbies? What makes a person pursue something that is just for pleasure (whether or not it actually appears to be pleasurable) even at great personal risk, effort, and time? And how do we get to our hobbies? Some people settle into quilting, classic cars collecting, model building while others are attracted to racing, sky diving, triathlons... 

This year, I spent hours working out to get into shape for my trek out West with my dad to hike in the Rockies, then rode fifteen hours in a truck to get there. Then, for four days, I allowed five 14,000-foot peaks kick my butt as I tried to conquer them one by one....as a hobby. 

Prior to this year, I never really stopped to think of how risky such a hobby was. For three years now, we've been driving to various locations around Colorado, hiking for a week or so fairly uneventfully (a great time with great memories), then driving on back. But this year, there was a series of events that made me stop cold in my tracks and really think about what it was that we were doing. 

For the most part, we had a beautiful week to hike, and the peaks we had selected were within our ability levels. We had proper equipment, food, and hydration with us, a GPS preloaded with maps for all of the trails, good shoes, and layers of warm clothing as we usually do. But on the second day of hiking, I saw a story on the local news of some missing hikers. You hear of this sort of thing from time to time, and I've heard stories from other hikers on summits of injuries, lost hiking partners, instantaneous blizzards or lightning storms, but nothing ever hit as close to home as the story on the news. 

A father and daughter hiking pair went out hiking on Wednesday, June 22 for a day hike up Missouri Mountain, a hike that would normally take somewhere between eight and twelve hours to complete. They were considered expert hikers with several years experience, and even some published articles on safety equipment and trail safety. At the end of the day, the hikers did not come down. They did not go back to their vacation home in town for dinner. They did not text or call loved ones. They didn't come back the next day either. Or the next. After three days, the ex-wife and mother of the hikers became concerned. So did the daughter's boyfriend. Finally, after five days, a search was started in the Collegiate Peaks Wilderness, an area that encompasses 167,584 acres of mountainous terrain, dense forest, and eight peaks over 14,000-feet. Helicopters, hiking teams, dogs, friends, and family all searched in vain for six or seven days. On Saturday, the bodies of the hikers were both found, 500 feet from the trail they were supposed to be on on Missouri Mountain, and only a few miles from the trailhead they started from. From Mount Belford's trail, my dad and I watched the helicopter land on a small flat space near some snow fields to pick up the last of the active search crews. News reports today indicate that they could have fallen as much as 2,000 feet from near the summit of Missouri. 

And if that wasn't enough, we also heard on Saturday that a woman fell to her death on Mount Princeton on Thursday, a peak that we had tackled just the day before. 

This is not some simple sport, not just something people pick up once a year or on the weekends for kicks. It's dangerous. Every peak offers life-threatening opportunities at many turns...exposed cliffs and walls, slippery scree fields, disappearing trails... So why do we do it? Why do we keep making plans and getting in shape and buying equipment, investing time, money, blood, sweat, and tears to go out and participate in the great risks that are clearly present? Something in us is designed for hobbies. Some place in us where passions meet irrationality. Where pursuits become personal vendettas against things that never did anything to us in the first place. Where your gut tells you, Yeah! Keep going! and your brain promptly agrees.

There are places in our lives where we get to pour passions, gifts, and abilities. For many, careers are the receptors. For many, it's family and children. For others its volunteering and serving others. For some of us, it's all of the above. But there are voids, gaps, where we still have passions leftover, gifts and abilities going unused. We seek out containers for the passion gaps, something with which to catch where those parts of us ooze out when left alone. Some seek out creative things, others things to get dirty and messy, still others to be able to just let loose and be free, some need a thrill or a rush, some a personal challenge.... And as these passion gap containers fill up with the drips of our gifts, passions, and abilities, we can peer into them and learn a little more about ourselves.

This week, I learned that although stubborn and bullheaded, I do have a cautious side. Ultimate freedom is too much for me. Boundaries, fences, and trails are good...even if they need to be pushed and challenged. They keep me focused. I learned that pushing myself expands my abilities and gifts to areas that I didn't even know they could be. Are those lessons worth the present risks? Because every hobby has risks...whether it's pricking a finger with a sewing needle, bug bites from the garden plot, a scraped knee falling off a bike, a parachute not opening with the ripcord... We were wired to seek out hobbies in order to seek out who we were created to be...making the risk completely worth the reward in every endeavor.