Last week Schweitzer hosted a ski club outing. This is mainly to drive the ski clubbers to use Schweitzer as their preferred skiing destination so they shack 'em up for free and give them a weekend of free skiing. The Marketing dept. had to take them on a tour of the mountain and a co-worker and myself were assigned to ski with the third group. We were paired with a ski instructor from Russia and three older ladies.
It was a windy day with big flakes of snow getting in your line of vision at all times. The powder was also just right that it covered the tips of your boots adding to the friction and slowing you down. If you aren't a comfortable skier or snowboarder it can be scary taking on just one of these elements, let alone both. One of the ladies was having difficulty making it down the mountain due to this fear and her turns were huge and about every third turn she would let herself fall to slow her already sluggish movement down. Of course when she fell she couldn't get up. My co-worker and I could sense her angst and knew she probably didn't want to continue the rest of the tour, which led her farther and farther away from the village.
We offered to escort her down a cat-track back to the village and she was ever so grateful. It was so windy and snowy and foggy that day that it was difficult to differentiate the ground from the sky and a cat-track is pretty narrow and cuts through the woods. All I kept thinking about was how crazy it would be if this poor woman got lost while we were helping her due to one wrong turn and we had to send out a search and rescue unit for her. Unfortunately the cat-track was the only way to make it back from the backside down to the village so we had to soldier on.
It was pretty slow-going, with the woman's nervousness increasing as the trail became narrower and narrower. If you can try to imagine, although it was a scary situation for her it was comical to us b/c we don't have to worry about breaking our legs, the way she felt she did. So pretending to be lost in the wild was a great movie to play out in our heads.
Anyway, once we finally reached the village and the lodge was in sight, the older lady was so thankful to us. Older generations always seem so shocked when people my age are willing to lend a helping hand. It wasn't a big deal to us because we had to make it back for a meeting, but my co-worker and I left feeling really great for some reason.
Katie and I discussed the increase in our optimism and I realized that it made us feel better to help someone out. I don't mean to sound like Mother Theresa, but this experience is definitely helping me to be more outgoing and stop and ask how some one's day is, even if I don't know them. The more I help someone out, I'm really helping myself out!
No comments:
Post a Comment