Moose Lake

Once I understood that nothing outside of me was stronger than what was inside of me, I was able to see every situation as a chance to change. And I realized this one night, on the shores of Moose Lake.

One year before I got busted, I dated a carpenter named Doug. Doug had bright blue eyes, sun bleached hair, and he introduced me to the most addictive drug I’d ever done.

Doug and I would drive to his house in Valemount every weekend, a small town an hour and a half west of Jasper, to party. Our version of “party” was sitting in his tiny living room – with its beat-up coffee table, and orange shag carpet – drinking beer and doing drugs. Up until I met Doug, I’d only snorted Cocaine, but he taught me how to cook it up into Freebase, or a home-made version of Crack.

One Sunday evening while were heavily into our party routine, I suddenly felt like I had to leave that night instead of waiting until Monday morning, like we usually did. Doug said okay as long I did the driving. He was asleep before we pulled out of the driveway.

On the way to Jasper you pass Moose Lake, across from Mount Robson, the tallest peak in the Canadian Rockies. I can still remember how the full moon bounced off the water. The snow-covered nine-thousand-foot mountain dominated the valley floor, as stars swirled around its peak. It was breathtaking; I had to stop.

As I pulled off the highway, I noticed the freebase was wearing off, and I wanted to smoke some more. Instead, I did something I had never done in my life: I prayed to God. If you had asked me, I would have told you I did not believe in God, but I was desperate. And something about that mountain scene made me believe there could be something bigger out there.  I remembered an experience I had when I was fourteen, where I felt the stars speaking to me, and I wondered if I in turn could speak to the stars.

So I looked up at the sky, and I told whatever power was out there that if it took this feeling of craving away, I would never touch freebase again. And to my complete and utter amazement, the feeling disappeared immediately. I pulled back onto the highway and spent the rest of the drive knowing that no matter what else happened I was not going to touch a substance that addictive ever again. In that moment, I knew there was a power in the universe greater than anything I had previously known. Tapping into this power would become the key to my personal transformation.

Now you may, or may not, believe in God.

But what happened that night at Moose Lake is: I made a choice.

And what I’ve come to learn through this life is that we are literally the sum total of the choices that we make, and we make thousands of them in any given day. And if you consider your thoughts to be choices, which I do, then we make tens of thousands of choices each day.

We instinctively know the difference between what will move us forward on our path, and what will hold us back, and it’s our job to try and catch ourselves when we find ourselves at that decision point, where one road leads to rock bottom, and another leads us toward the life of our dreams…