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Dear Reader,

I am getting ready to embark on the Salmon River Slowdown with my co-creator and nine women who can't wait to launch on the adventure of a lifetime on Monday. So, I thought I'd share a letter I wrote three years ago when I returned from another river trip on the tail end of another Olympics.

I will see you back here in two weeks. Make some joy until then and walk barefoot at least once. Notice what you notice,

Remember my last letter and how I told you about my anxieties around our upcoming river trip? Well, you received this letter here in your mailbox today, so that’s already a spoiler that we didn’t drown (not that something actually dangerous was ever the source of my fears). And while I lost my phone in a challenge to the river gods, my whits did not disappear in the rapid with it.

Other than that, everything I was afraid of happening pretty much happened on Day 1: Not only did I get the boat stuck on a rock, but it also:

• happened again and again and again and again and again
• came quite close to becoming a flipped boat at one point
• was bad enough, once, that we had to be pulled off the rock by a handsome river guide

And you know what? As it was happening, I could not have cared any less. And it wasn’t just because I was too busy becoming the best push-the-boat-off-the-rocker I could be. Fact is, as soon as I set foot on the beach at the put-in, my brain switched to river mode. All my neuroses, anxieties, and joy destroyers are turned down, if not off. I don’t think about work, chores, or money. The only context in which I think of any humans who aren’t on the river with me is when I wish they were. I have no interest in being better/smarter/cooler than anybody, which is (I grudgingly admit) not my default state. Hey, I am working on it – ask my coaches.

The only entity I engage with in a manner that could be regarded as somewhat competitive is the river. I don’t want to win over it, and I couldn’t if I tried. But I can’t afford to lose, either, as in being shoved into a wall, wrapped around a boulder, or flipped by a rogue wave. So lady river and I push and pull back and forth, until we agree on which way the boat will move downriver. Mr. Laine describes it as waltzing with a new partner every day, one who leads without always being clear on which steps she needs you to take next.

Quite different forms of competition have been playing out on our screens since we got back. The ones that certainly end with a winner, sometimes an expected, and sometimes an unexpected one.

Or two, as was the case in my favorite Olympic moment: Qatari high-jumper Barshim interrupted the official as he started to explain the jump-off procedures after Bashari and Italy's Tamberi tied for first place in the high jump.

Barshim to the official: “Can we have two golds?”

Official: “Umm, it’s possible.”

Barshim to Tamberi, not even listening to the rest of the official’s answer: “History, my friend.”

Joy, you see, is not a limited resource. Nor is success, especially when joy is the measure of it. Joy even seemed to double when those two world-class athletes shared their success. You can watch the moment on YouTube if you could use some shared joy today (and who doesn’t).

I am leaving you with this food for thought today: Do you have an activity, a place, a relationship in which you feel entirely you? In which your joy does not come from being in comparison but in unison, with yourself and others?

If yes, can you make a plan to spend some time there this coming week?

If not, can you make a plan this week for finding or creating such a setting for yourself?

From my joy-filled heart to yours,
​Sylke