Forgetting to order the gravel

During our conversation on Thursday, my therapist WC introduced me to yet another particularly poignant illustration, this one about the fragility of carefully and artfully rectified mental stability: you have to remember to order in the gravel.
If one pictures thoughts as being like currents of water coursing through the brain, then thought patterns are like river valleys, their streams carving themselves ever more profoundly decade upon decade.
As comfortable as the water becomes, following its familiar course, as do one's thoughts - happy to pursue the precise and comfortable path which has been laid out for them. The subsequent liquid is increasingly more and more likely to follow the path laid out by the preceding flow. The greatest river valleys all started out one day as small streams, grown with the passage of time and with the predictable assurance of the path of least resistance.
The point he makes is clear: the temptation in such a project is to focus on the obvious work: digging the new chanel and diverting the flow. The durability of the job however depends on the backfilling: you must remember to order in the gravel, and fill all those low-lying areas whither the stream is so eager to flow.
I forgot to order in the gravel, and found my mental flow straying from the newly-constructed chanel and eating away at the banks of the old, familiar stream. It was time to backfill that valley, and to remember to monitor it for future erosion.

We are the Champions

It is with delight that I report here the Cinderella story that was my ice hockey team's victory last evening in the one-game final match of the summer season. It was my fortune as well to play a key role in salvaging a victory from what in the waning seconds of the match seemed like certain defeat for our force.
It is easy sometimes to dismiss the results of this or that match, or season, as the accident of the moment. Perhaps more so when the result does not go ones way. It is perhaps equally tempting to ascribe fortuitous results such as that which we experienced last evening as being the product of some larger approbation, particularly given the circumstance in which our unlikely victory took place, i.e. in the face of an intimidatingly superior opponent.
In any case to the victors go the smiles, and when the dust settled we had pulled off an incredible come-from-behind victory. Down 3-1 with three minutes left, we fought back to score first one, and then the equalizer, with 1.3 seconds left on the clock, to send us to overtime. We fought through an overtime in which our opponents prematurely celebrated upon striking the crossbar with the puck and then buried them in a shootout.