Isn’t It Cool, Norwegian Wool?*

ByDavid

You’ve probably heard mention of the “black sheep,” the one that doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of the family or the team or the herd.

I think a black sheep saved my family’s life a few years ago.

Well, not literally.

I mean, it was, literally, a black sheep but the saving our lives part… a bit of dramatic license maybe.

We were in Norway, my wife, daughters, and I. We took a funicular train, the kind built for riding up mountains, all the way to the top and planned on hiking for a while before taking the train back down.

We got lost. Our “Easy to Medium” trail became a “ledges narrower than your blood-soaked shoe” trail. Whenever that last train left for the lower elevations, we missed it.

It sounds scary and it was. We had a few things going for us, though.

  • I’m really used to getting lost and being lost and being calm while being lost
  • My wife is really good at navigation. We complement each other like that
  • Summer in Norway means a lot of sunlight. It wasn’t going to get dark until after 11 pm
  • We found a black sheep

A black sheep that wandered away from its herd, living up to the legend.

And a couple of bigger sheep found it and forcibly guided it back to the pack. We followed.

The sheep had ear tags so we knew we couldn’t be too far from civilization.

We never found the shepherd, but we found signs that we could interpret (arrows… the international language) well enough to get us to a more hospitable trail.

We walked back down… all the way back down, quite relieved that while our feet might be bloodied, we would not be defeated by an Easy to Medium Mountain hike.

If you know, if you work with a black sheep, let them wander a little bit off the path. They might discover things by thinking differently, by looking where nobody else thought to look.

And they might just have the answer someone is looking for.

What do you think?

See you tomorrow!

*Thanks Debbie!