Advise, Don't Lead

This morning there is no patio. No coffee steaming while the waterfall gurgles in the background, no wide array of flower colors to take in while my brain slowly comes online. Instead, I am writing today's Patio Pondering on a Bluebird bus, rolling through the familiar corn fields of rural Indiana, headed toward New Mexico with eleven other adults and twenty-four Scouts. In a couple of short days, everything our crew needs will be on our backs, and we'll be walking into the back country of Philmont Scout Ranch for twelve days.

Many people have written about the magic of Philmont, and with far more eloquence than I can muster. I'm not going to try to compete with that. I'm just trying to put words to how I feel on this bus, before I've even arrived, and honestly, my brain hasn't caught up yet. The roads look too familiar. It hasn't sunk in.

This is my second trip to Philmont. The first was in 2017, with my eldest son. That time, I was just another adult along for the ride. This time, I'm the Lead Crew Advisor, responsible for our crew's paperwork and the one who answers if something goes wrong.

I want to be clear about something first. Our Lead Adult Advisor has done a yeoman's job organizing, communicating, and preparing our contingent for this high adventure. My role is easier because of his work. This isn't about elevating my title. It's about the difference in what leading versus advising asks of you, and I've felt that difference on this bus in a way I couldn't have explained to you a week ago.

At Philmont, and in most worthwhile experiences, the adults are advisors, not leaders, once you hit the trail. I talk about this on next week's podcast: stepping back to let others lead is hard when you're wired to want the experience to go just right. But Philmont, and life generally, isn't about getting everything just right. The best lessons and the memories that stick come from things going sideways. An unplanned detour from a missed trail marker. A cooking mishap. A misstep that forces you to reallocate gear on the fly. The path from point A to point B is rarely a straight line, in the back country or anywhere else.

How we react to those imperfect moments is what shapes the memory and the lesson. Do we embrace the suck, as they say in military training, or do we lash out with the uncontrolled emotion of built-up stress?

In 2017, I carried too much of what I couldn't control with me on the trail. Two separate things happened that trek, unrelated to each other but connected in what they revealed. Early on, the Scouts lost a compass I had loaned them to navigate our climb up Baldy, and my reaction to it should have been a warning sign that I wasn't mentally prepared for what was ahead. I didn't heed it. Days later, after a long, hard push from the humidity of the north country into the dry desert of the south, the accumulated stress put me over the edge. I tripped over a Scout's water bottle, left in the exact spot we had just told him not to put it, and how I reacted to that fall is one of my life's regrets. I didn't understand it then, but I was carrying weight I hadn't packed on purpose, the same way unneeded gear finds its way into an Osprey pack and never gets used, just carried. Both kinds of weight add up. Both kinds break you if you let them.

This time, for reasons that took years to sort out, I'm in a different place. I'm asking questions instead of reacting quickly. I'm standing back to observe, looking for how I can help, instead of sitting there gathering up wrongs to criticize. Last time, I carried the weight of leading when my job was to advise. That weight is out of my pack and out of my head this time, and I notice the difference in both places.

With that weight gone, I'm looking forward to watching nine young men go through Form, Storm, Norm, and Perform, the way every group finds its footing before it finds its stride. My job isn't to get them there faster or smoother. My job is to watch, ask good questions, and keep them safe while they figure it out themselves.

The corn fields are still rolling by. I still don't quite believe I'll be on the trail in a few days. But I believe I'm walking into this trip lighter than I did in 2017, and that has nothing to do with what's in my pack.