"Your Pack Is Too Full....."

I wasn't quite sure what was meant by the comment at first; then when I heard it mentioned to my shelter partner as well, we began to talk about it... We had each been told once or twice, in a kind of abstract way by the Outward Bound Instructor, that: "Your pack is too full...".

When first hearing that I shrugged off the comment as I knew I could carry all the gear in my pack. Yet the quiet suggestion seemed not to have been made about anything in the physical realm, but more so about understandings on another level...

The Instructor first said this to me when discussing and sharing ideas for navigation, when I think I kind of dismissed what could have been helpful support. I am a confident navigator who has years of practice out orienteering with lots of different maps & compasses, over many kinds of terrain. I guess I thought that at that time there wasn't much one of my fellow students might offer to help me improve, get better at, or even develop more awareness about when it came to navigation skills. I thought it was an oddly timed comment as at that moment there didn't seem to be any connection between the map discussion and the 'fullness' of my pack...

There in was the nature of my 'know everything' about navigation attitude. There was certainly no room in my 'pack', nor my mind, for new ideas and awareness...

Over the course of that day I was to lose myself more than once, get off track many times, read the terrain wrongly, and even not see some common signs that would assist with direction finding when one is very tired... So much for certainty in the nature of having 'known it all' when real navigation way out there was the challenge. In a Kaizen kind of way, that Outward Bound Instructor quietly demonstrated to me that my pack was indeed too full...

I have pondered the gift of that comment many times over the years, in countless adventure situations. It is a valued musing shared back then with me that I ensure to carry in my pack even now. There is always room for just a little bit more in there.....

DSD