Fairly recently, I found myself on a pontoon boat with my family.
We had rented it for four hours—10am to 2pm to be exact—and we were planning on doing a barbecue lunch on the boat.
I should mention, the boat came with its own barbecue.
I should also mention, I had never barbecued on a boat before.
Final thing to mention, our kids don't really eat well in general, let alone on boats.
So we rented the boat, drove around for a while, docked on a small island/sandbar, had lunch, did some fishing, drove around a bit more, and then returned the boat.
It was a fun way to spend the day.
It turns out that barbecuing on a boat isn't all that different to barbecuing on a non-boat, and our kids didn't each much of anything but they were too distracted to care.
***
I'd like to talk about hills.
To keep it simple, let's imagine going uphill, reaching the top and taking a look around, then going downhill.
The uphill part is hard. You're usually carrying the heaviest load. You're not sure exactly how long it will take, but it certainly feels long. Longer than the downhill part anyway.
Once you reach the top, you can pause. You know the top won't really last forever, but it's worth taking in while you're there. It's certainly not worth wasting because it did take some effort to get there. Your load will start to get lighter while you're here.
Going downhill your load is lighter. The journey feels familiar and so despite it being the same distance, it feels faster.
The thing about hills is, we're always on them.
In my boat story, when I was doing the grocery shopping for lunch on the boat, and in fact, with anything I was doing before getting to lunch, I was going uphill. Lunch was the top of the hill. The ride back to the boat rental place felt easy and smooth.
I could replace this story with so many others like it.
Sometimes a single hill can take months to climb. There are also many hills we climb in a single day.
The trick to climbing hills is to recognize which part you're on.
Don't forget to pause at the top and look around.
