My son’s friend fell recently while hiking in St. George. Broke a few bones, will be okay. It got us talking about hiking, about clumsiness — timely, because the cupboard door pull had just hooked my belt loop mid-conversation and jerked me forward. Jake’s question landed: if I’m that clumsy, how did we all survive a single hike, much less all the ones I dragged us on?
This is my actual position on most things: I observe. I don’t narrate other people’s choices out loud. Not because I don’t have opinions — I have opinions about everything, including things I have no business opining on — but because the context I’m missing is almost always the part that would change the opinion. I wouldn’t know the relationship, the background, the present circumstances, the prior resources. I don’t know your life.
When someone asks for my perspective, I try to give them the process, not the answer. Because the process is the thing that will still be useful next time, when the context is different and the answer I gave them this time no longer applies.
I am clumsy enough to know that you can do something right and still fall.
Brace Yourself
Abbey had to choose her rubber band colors. Halloween was coming. The options were Halloween colors or fall colors, which sounds like a binary but is actually a philosophical fork: do you commit to the occasion or do you commit to the season? These are different kinds of optimism.
She couldn’t decide. So we took a vote. I asked the front desk receptionist. I asked the technician. We had a panel. The panel had opinions. Abbey listened to the opinions, weighed them against her own, and made a choice.
This is democracy. This is also just how decisions work when you’re not sure what you want: you expose the question to other people and watch what their answers make you feel. If you’re relieved when someone agrees with you, you already knew what you wanted. If you’re annoyed when someone disagrees, same.
What I was trying to give her, through the elaborate theater of the orthodontist office panel discussion, was not the right answer about the rubber bands. It was a demonstration that having a method for making decisions is different from having the right answer — and that the method is more portable. Even though I never had orthodontia myself, I could still go through the process alongside her. Sometimes it’s firsthand experience. Sometimes it’s just the way of thinking.
What the hiking is about
When I first started hiking with my kids, I narrated. Not every step, not every moment — not every hike has to be the hike. But I always pointed things out. Why we lower our center of gravity when we’re about to slip. Why you find the stable rock rather than the loose dirt. Why you put your hand back behind you when someone smaller is navigating a drop.
None of this requires a geology degree. It is just the decision-making process, made audible, in a context where the consequences are immediately visible and hopefully not catastrophic. I’d been testing the limits of clumsiness and ADHD accessibility in the great outdoors for years — of course I hoped they’d avoid some of my near-misses, if I was specific enough.
The rubber bands and the hiking are the same thing: low-stakes repetitions of a skill you will need when the stakes are not low.
I carried my kids on some hikes. Dragged them on others. On some, we turned around. But on every hike, I consciously tried to notice at least one thing out loud about how I’m reading the terrain — because at some point they’re going to be on terrain I’m not on, and I want them to have heard someone think through it.
The voice that guides my own peripheral observations when I’m outside is my dad’s. I hear it as Kevin snippets — distinct, deep, specific: Take it easy, Kels. Keep your foot on that dry rock. Slow down. He kept me alive on a lot of adventures that, given my relationship with doorframes, I probably should not have survived. I know what it means to have someone’s voice in your head when they’re not there. That’s the whole point of narrating.
The thing about context
The reason I don’t narrate other people’s choices is the same reason I try to narrate my own out loud: context is almost everything. What looks like a bad decision from the outside is usually a reasonable decision given information I don’t have. What looks like a good decision is usually the product of a process that isn’t visible.
Making the process visible is the whole project. Not performing certainty. Not arriving with the answer. Thinking out loud, in real time, in front of the people who are watching.
Abbey chose the Halloween colors. Two votes for Halloween, one abstention — and she knew what she wanted before the panel finished deliberating. That’s how you know the process worked. The braces are gone now. The skill isn’t.
One day when they respond instinctively to danger or make a difficult choice without flinching — they’ll have practiced for it. In rubber bands and loose rock and low stakes, over and over, until the method is theirs. Not a broken bone. A snap.