Safety - October 2005

Crossing the Line
by John Kraske

For several weeks after the incident I tried my best to sort out what went wrong and what I should have done differently. Things could have gone better than they did on that first day of January, 2003. Since that time, not too many days had gone by that I hadn’t questioned my actions and my decision to paddle that day. Until one night when I randomly opened up one of the many books that I keep at my bedside, and the following jumped off one of the pages:

If you have ever been in a life-or-death emergency situation, you will know that it wasn’t a problem. The mind didn’t have time to fool around and make it into a problem. In a true emergency, the mind stops; you become totally present in the NOW, and something infinitely more powerful takes over. This is why there are many reports of ordinary people suddenly becoming capable of incredibly courageous deeds. In any emergency, either you survive or you don’t. Either way, it is not a problem.

—From The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, by Eckhart Tolle (New World Library, 2004)

I consider myself an ordinary person—one who has years of paddling and other maritime experience. I hardly consider myself a courageous person, but after the fact, Tolle’s words seemed to be very accurate. At the time of the incident, I did consider the situation to be a problem, and I mentally reprimanded myself for the decisions I made that got my friend Chris and me into that life-and-death emergency. It was only when I quit thinking about the problem and started to act that I felt that the words from that passage really did ring true.