20230524
Age: 21
Hometown: Toronto, ON
Profession: Kayak Coach

What do you do for a living?
I am a kayak coach.
I coach people to become better kayakers.
I coach adults of all ages and abilities.
I coach people with disabilities from the age of 8 all the way to 80, as they often say.
[Do you get any enjoyment from it?]
I get lots of enjoyment out of it!
I feel very good about where I’m at.
I’m incredibly privileged to be able to work this job.
It is not full-time, so I’m incredibly privileged to be able to work and live a lifestyle that is convenient for me, which is not full-time year-round, and being able to live off that makes me very, very happy.

What is ART to you?
Art is whatever you make to invoke emotion.
Art is a way to escape your day-to-day.

What is the last piece of art you consumed, and/or a piece of art that greatly impacted you?
How did it make you feel?
I recently watched Guardians of the Galaxy 3.
I hated every second of it.
[Why did you hate it?]
You can pour so much money into a project, you can have so many people working on something for such a long amount of time, and you can still create something that’s just terrible, void of any emotion, void any real feelings or an impact beyond wasting people’s money and time.
And companies know that they can do this because people will consume that kind of content, and it will make money even though it’s void of anything of any importance, lesson, emotion, life, humanity.
It’s just really a gross practice.
Hated it every second.
I can’t express enough how bad it was.
I also didn’t eat until 4 p.m. that day, so I was extra hangry.

Is there a creative aspect to your job?
You know, I’m not a very creative person.
I’m a kayak coach.
It’s sports, right?
It’s usually not very creative.
There are certain times where you do have to be creative and kind of work on the fly.
For example, I think about equipment and ways to use equipment, especially when working with certain athletes or athletes with disabilities.
Sometimes their abilities are different from your regular athletes, your regular clientele, so changing the way that you work with people can definitely be creative.
There’s also a certain creativity in the way you use language.
You’re often trying to explain a concept to people in a way that’s going to make them understand, and there’s no one perfect way to explain a technique that will speak to everybody.
You often have to change it around depending on whether you’re talking to an 8-year-old, a 60-year-old, or anybody in between.

How do you perceive people who work in the arts?
I think people who work in the arts are doing very great work.
Especially, when it comes to what I see as a way of not working.
I was listening to Brian Eno talk about this the other day.
He’s an ambient composer from the 70s, and he was imploring people “to not work.”
He was saying he would go to art schools, and the professors didn’t like him very much because his first thing he would say when giving a lecture would be:

“Hello, welcome, my name is Brian Eno, and I want you guys to never work.”

I think a lot of what he says resonated with me, and it’s something that I think about fairly often as being someone who only works part-time.
Capitalism is pretty void, or makes work pretty void in many ways.
We are often drawn to this concept that we NEED to work, and I think capitalism, through its incentives to work, often makes us need to work.
It’s that need for money, right?
We need to survive, we need to find a job and work.
But really, that can take a lot of the pleasure out of the job, by knowing that we have no other option.
It’s not: “I want to do this project, I want to work on this piece of music.”
For most people, it’s: “I need to work at this sandwich shop, and at the same time make some music, and hopefully make it [as an artist], so I can stop working at the sandwich shop.”
It’s these incentives created by capitalism that make work really weird, and an odd and difficult concept to grasp, and feel fulfillment from.
But I think that people who work in the arts are kind of rebelling against that in many ways.
Successfully?
I don’t know…
But I think that there’s a lot to be said for people who choose to go to school, or choose a way of living that’s very far apart from the beaten path.

What do you do when you feel like you’re lacking creativity?
I’m still trying to figure that out…
It’s been 21 years, and I haven’t felt any creativity yet, so I’ll let you know eventually!
I’d also like to expand on one of the previous questions:
I think the other creative aspect to my job that I didn’t speak about was creating workouts.
This is a pretty obvious one, a pretty fun one, but you know, you often think of workouts in the framework that it’s  people telling themselves:
“Oh, I ran 10 minutes on the treadmill,
and then I lifted this weight 10 times,
and then I lifted this other weight 10 times,
and then I went home.
And it’s like, well… no, there are actually a lot more fun ways to structure your workouts.
For example if you take that 10 min cardio workout:
you can run for 3,
walk for another 2,
and go back to running for another 5,
and then do it all over again.
There are tons of ways to structure a workout and to split up those
10 minutes,
or that hour,
or 40 minutes,
into something that feels a lot more digestible than if you had to do the same workout every morning ad nauseum.
Like if you were to run the same 10-kilometre run going at the same speed, same places, same 60 minutes every morning, working out and staying healthy will start to feel like a drag.
But if you do it in a way that’s more digestible, switching small things up, you can make workouts fun.
It makes a big difference.
A lot of people don’t really see that but if you work out often you will probably get a lot of benefits out of a nice fun structured workout versus something that’s not as fun.
There’s also a lot of writing and studies on the topic.
So beyond just the numbers on the page I help the people I train to figure out for themselves how long they want to go, when they want to stop, and how long to stop for…
On top of all that a big aspect of my job is a lot of program writing and putting together fun days for athletes of all ages.