This might as well be fictional, who knows? What is real?
1
It was the morning of Christmas Eve. I was at the common kitchen of a motel in Mont-Tremblant, Quebec, staring out the window. Snow was absolutely dumping outside and it added one thick layer to what was already on the ground from the day prior. The storm continued.
At that moment, there was nothing but peace. I didn’t feel excited about the hills and snowboarding, which I knew would happen later that day and I was very much looking forward to it. I was not agitated by the fact that we were half-stuck at a motel, and quite literally there was at least 30-minute worth of snow shovelling to do in order to get the car out and running. I didn’t feel stressed out about what happened the previous day and the uncertainty around the rest of the trip. What I felt was that I was fully in the moment and I wanted to go nowhere but here.
2
On the day before Christmas Eve, we left Montreal before 2pm to beat the storm. It had been raining heavily in the city. The rain would turn to snow and the surface would become icy later that afternoon as the temperature dropped. As we were going north, it had already been snowing up there. Along with high wind, numerous households suffered from power outage, including the chalet we originally booked on Airbnb. Although the snow on the way concerned me slightly since the high wind might cause blowing snow which would reduce visibility to near zero, fortunately I had grown quite accustomed with the winter weather and the best practices of driving in the snow. The power outage, on the other hand, was completely outside of my comfort zone. In some cases, without power the water system doesn’t work either, as it is supported by electricity.
We were parked in front of a frosty shopping mall along the highway, taking bites of burgers from A&W, without root beers to wash them down, when we received a notification that our reservation on Airbnb just got cancelled. It was understandable and even a relief, but it meant we needed to find a place to stay for the night. After placing a request on another Airbnb property in that area, we decided to drive up while waiting for a confirmation.
So I drove up. The sun sets by 4:15pm around the end of December in Quebec, and it was almost dark when we reached Lac Superieur. 15 Nord and Trans-Canadian highway are winding and scenery in the summer times, while in the midst of a winter storm, they could be tricky. On a related note, we saw at least 6 cars stuck in the snow along the highways, but that’s a story for a different time.
As I exited onto a regional road, there was more snow on the ground than the snowplows could deal with. There was still no news from the Airbnb host, so I decided to park the car and wait for a confirmation before going too deep into the snow. We found a parking lot in front of a neighbourhood corner store. There were many people inside, making last minute grocery shopping, or perhaps preparing for the storm. The snow dropped quietly on the windshield, blocked all the view. It was completely dark out.
We waited for about 15 minutes. Response from the Airbnb host was not exactly cheerful - due to the outage, they were not able to host us either.
It felt like in a movie, white Christmas, snowy town, and pine trees. Icy roads, empty car, Fargo.
3
On Christmas Day, the condition on Mont-Tremblant was more than good. Two days of snowstorm has brought near 100 cm of fresh snow, despite making it challenging to maintain all the lifts and trails. I took the Express Gondola to reach the summit, 875 meters above sea level.
It was windy and cloudy. As I was strapping into the board, I remembered exactly one year ago I was also in the mountains of Quebec. It was that trip that made me decide to pursue a side career in teaching snowboarding. After I had gotten back to Toronto I had set a goal of getting certified by CASI, which I did in Alberta in February. There was another major goal for the year 2022, which has been a legacy goal from the previous years, and I was able to check it off the list by the end of the fall.
This made me think, goals are rather binary - either I achieve them or not. I thought my understanding of goal setting should be at least within the first quartile - I have a degree in psychology and I have invested one full semester in Human Motivation, where I became familiarized with not only SMART goals but also SMARRT goals (the second R stands for “relevant”). Years of training and practicing has brought me where I was - either setting goals that I could fortunately achieve and inevitably question what comes next, or fixating on goals I have yet achieved and doubt my goal setting skills. It was hard to acknowledge that there are also factors outside of my control. If I were to set a goal of “snowboarding 100 km over the holidays”, which by the SMARRT system, is a great goal, snowstorm for one day or two could easily throw me off the trajectory. I can’t be blamed for the weather, just like I can’t take all the credits when randomness plays her part.
I suddenly lost all interests in setting SMART or SMARRT goals for 2023. Instead of goals, I will look out for my lighthouses, the virtues, in order to stay on my path.
There I was, on the slope, and that was all I wanted. A moment ago I wanted some hot water, and before that I wanted not to be trapped in the snowstorm. It was not the milage that I cared about, it was the moment, the present, and every single second leading towards it.
I put on the goggles and dived onto the slope.
4
On the day before Christmas Eve, we arrived at a motel. Although it’s only 20-min from the resort, this area had always been off my radar as I usually just drove it by to get to more exciting activities. I pulled up into the parking lot in front the main entrance. Judging by the speed it snowed, we’d need to dig the car out the next day. But it was a problem for tomorrow.
I felt grateful we were able to find the tiny spot on Google Maps, and it happened to have vacancy on a stormy night. As we were waiting in the parked car, I had many memories flashing into to my mind. I remembered that guy who walked an hour in the snow to his favourite restaurant, I remembered the viral video of cars and buses slipping down the street in Montreal. I even remembered the time I injured my lower back while snowboarding, and how painful it was riding a car. After we called the motel, those cold and sad memories evaporated. The 20-minute ride felt like the Disney ferry to the Magic Kingdom.
The motel looked exactly like on the postcards. Cottage design, long wings, decorated with snowshoes on the wall. We walked through the wooden door and rang the bell at the front desk. An asian lady showed up, and we explained we called earlier to inquire. The lady helped us with check-in and told us luckily this region didn’t not lose power.
“Do you happen to speak Mandarin?” She asked.
We said yes, but we wasn’t expecting that, not at a motel in the mountains of Quebec.
“公共厨房里有灶台和锅，你们可以煮点东西吃。(There is a stove and pots in the common kitchen which you can cook food with)”, She said in Mandarin.
So we had dumplings on the day before Christmas Eve.
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