Where in the world am I today?: Woke up in Cartagena, Columbia and am headed home…

Watched “Man on Wire” again yesterday and was struck by a moment in the documentary where Philippe Petit has walked the wire between the World Trade Centers and the Police and Reporters all want to know “Why” – His response is fantastic – “There is no why.”

In the days leading up to Christmas it snowed a lot in North Vancouver where I live! Not just on one day, but on about four or five different days we got just dumped on. Initially it wasn’t the nice sticky snow that’s good for making snowballs, but rather a drier powdery snow that didn’t seem to want to stick. 

My boys and I discovered that even though the snow wouldn’t pack the way we wanted it to for snowballs, we could create snow bricks by filling up a big bucket and packing the snow into it sort of like making bricks for a sand castle at the beach. The perfect snow castle of course seemed to be an igloo, so we set about constructing an igloo in our backyard – well a half igloo as we built it against the back fence. 

There wasn’t really an obvious “why” involved, because who needs a “why” getting in the way of the statement – We’re building an igloo in our backyard. More important than asking why was the journey that was involved in figuring out how to make the bricks, dealing with the different textures of snow that fell from the sky on a daily basis and working towards the goal that we had set for ourselves. 

We had setbacks. I woke up one morning to discover that part of the wall had collapsed and I had to go back several steps and spend a great deal of time rebuilding the section that had fallen apart. ‘Why bother rebuilding’ never really entered the picture… It was just supposed to be. My boys and I were going to have an igloo in the back yard and we weren’t going to let a little set back get in the way.

We had a huge breakthrough the day the picture above was taken when we built the first roof arches and it actually felt like this dream we set out achieve was going to become a reality. The day after this shot was taken the snow that fell from the sky was perfect sticky snow-ball snow and the remains of the roof construction were a breeze compared to everything that had come before. 

The igloo only lasted about a week before the weather warmed up and the structure really did collapse but the length of time it lasted mattered less than the fact that we had achieved the crazy dream we had put before ourselves. 

Be it igloo or some other crazy mission I hope I’m able to remember not to let a question like ‘why’ get in the way of the joy derived from the the pursuit of dreams.

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