and this portage is...

Portaging, schmortaging. Don’t you see that it doesn’t matter what activity I chose? It doesn’t matter what activity anyone chooses. If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill, take it and push it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before, push it to the wildest edge of edges, then you force it into the realm of magic. And it doesn’t matter what you select, because when it is pushed far enough it contains everything else. I’m not talking about specialization. To specialize is to brush one tooth. When a person specializes he channels all of his energies through one narrow conduit; he knows one thing extremely well and is ignorant of almost everything else. That is not it. That is tame and insular and severely limiting. I’m talking about taking one thing, however trivial and mundane, to such extremes that you illuminate its relationship to all other things, and then taking it a little bit further - to the point of cosmic impact where it becomes all other things.*

*Bastardized Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues