Neil Pasricha’s best-selling book, The Book of Awesome, is awesome. It’s full of small joys, things we too often overlook. Like, licking the batter off the beaters of a cake mixer. Getting a trucker to blow his horn. Eating things past the expiry date. You get the idea. I was inspired to start my own book of awesome things about paddling rivers.

Whitewater parks. Twenty years ago a circular river without a shuttle was only a dream. Some paddler took our dreams and turned them into a supermarket check out belt lifting us out at the bottom and lowering us back in at the top. AWESOME.

The double fist pump. The universal signal for, “Yeeaaaah…WhooooHoooo…Did you see that?…Check it out, I’m still alive!” You feel AWESOME.

Seeing people on the river you learned to paddle with. You swam together. Shivered together. Cried together. Drank together. Swore you’d paddle forever. And you have. AWESOME.

Drysuit pee zips. AAAHHHSOME.

The airline ticket agent who tags your kayak, winks and wishes you a happy golf vacation. Most paddlers have jobs, and at least one I now know works the baggage counter of an international airline. AWESOME.

Thinking you forgot your helmet, but didn’t. AWESOME.

Jumping on someone else’s Grand Canyon permit. This is sort of like being at the very end of a check out line on a long weekend Friday when the light pops on at the next register and the girl says to you, “Sir, I can help you over here.” Only more AWESOME.

When the feeling returns to your feet. AWESOME.

Driving in bare feet. Whether it’s actually illegal or just an urban myth, there is nothing like kicking off your flip-flops and wrapping your toes around the cool rubber pedals. AWESOME.

Finding a half-eaten PowerBar in your PFD. Because it’s half-not-eaten. AWESOME.

Salamander helmet visors. Refer to, Seeing people on the river you learned to paddle with. AWESOME.

Take-out beer. It’s even sweeter when you didn’t bring any, and some dude from the group beside you shouts, “Hey, you guys want beer?” AWESOME.

Catching a throw bag. Because one is seldom thrown to you when you don’t truly need it. AWESOME.

Freeballin’ in a pair of Carhartts. To be fair, I’ve been told by women that freeboobin’ under heavy cotton t-shirts also feels AWESOME.

Jumper cables. AWESOME.

Government-run river and rain gauges. Although nostalgic about the old days of calling the locals (the fact they went and checked the rivers is AWESOME), we can now forecast water levels in our pajamas. Who did they really create these for? Who cares. AWESOME.

iTunes Store. You can now find Rapid anywhere in the world. On our iPad and online issues we can also add digital extras including photo galleries (page 16), video interviews (page 22) and video boat reviews (pages 26–27), and links to back issue articles and advertisers’ websites. AWESOME.

Teva tan. AWESOME.

Pick-up truck shuttles. Besides the fact that it’s redneck fun, there are plenty of practical reasons to do this. Not enough seats. Don’t want to get the seats soaked. And my favorite example of boater logic: “Tom, Russ and I will ride in the back to hold onto the boats.” AWESOME.

Gravity. Because without gravity, there’d be no AWESOME in my book.

This article originally appeared in Rapid, Spring 2013. Download our free iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch App orAndroid App or read it here.

Only a handful of times have I been to the edge—life threatening, soul searching, that-almost-killed-me events. The kind, to put it mildly, I never wish to experience again. What I remember about these brief, endless moments on the river is two things: first, the burning of water blasting through my sinus cavity and behind my eyeballs; and second, the confusion. 

The other half of my life is considerably more sedate. I’m an academic, which means I read a lot, teach some, think about ideas and go to conferences. While sometimes I still walk away saying, “That almost killed me,” for the most part it is a safer place. Within this reading, teaching, ideas and conference circuit, there are a couple of gurus. One of them, a round, grey-haired sociologist, specializes in confusion. 

Sensemaking, actually. The opposite of confusion. Sensemaking is “the process by which people give meaning to experience” he writes in his seminal work on risk management and error prevention. Karl Weick is fascinated with how individuals make sense of a situation. His specialty is how people deal with crisis. 

Back to the edge. 

It was a medium drop on the Upper Yough with a way-left boof line. Lock the lip, boof…why am I not coming up? Where am I? How long did it take me to figure out I was getting surfed between the curtain and the rock wall? Minutes? A second? Hard to tell. My confusion was dark, loud and all consuming. 

The field of risk management and accident investigation commonly retraces the decision-making process preceding and during a critical event. In this case, the decisions preceding my slip (being 16 inches off line) were sound. What should occur next—the decisions in the moment of crisis—either minimizes or escapes the situation. This is where Weick and sensemaking comes in, or doesn’t. 

Confusion precludes decision-making. Weick explains that how one makes sense of a situation directly affects what gets decided. If sensemaking does not catch up with a situation that is desperate and life threatening, then other critical decisions are not made. 

“The less adequate the sensemaking process directed at a crisis, the more likely it is that the crisis will get out of control,” he concludes. 

The thing with theory is that it doesn’t help with the water blasting my eyeballs and the rock wall where I want to put my paddle. In this case I didn’t make sense of where I was until I had already minimized the problem to something I could deal with. I needed air. As I focused on solving my basic air problem, I eventually figured out what was going on. 

Weick can explain this, too. “There is a delicate trade-off between dangerous action which produces understanding, and safe inaction which produces confusion…people don’t know what the appropriate action is until they take some action and see what happens.” In effect, trial and error helps define what is going on, and brings sense to the confusion. Waiting to see what happens only makes things worse. 

Sensemaking grows with experience. A wider range of experience allows wider breadth of sensemaking. That doesn’t mean I’m going to volunteer to get pinned just to get a sense of it. I’d rather take my chances on the conference circuit. 

This article originally appeared in Rapid, Spring 2013. Download our free iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch App orAndroid App or read it here.