Are You Up For This? (A Message Of Hope)

On an evening in the summer of 2019, I found myself in a small ski chalet, re-packing and organizing all my backpacking gear. The next day, I was set to depart on my latest hiking adventure in the Rocky mountains.

As the sun slowly set and “Day 1” grew closer, I felt a little nervous.

“Why do I do this?" I thought to myself. “Why do I always pick the ‘hard’ trip, the physically strenuous trip? Couldn’t I have just made it easy on myself this time?”

The thoughts skittered about my brain, sparking little winged spasms of anxiety in my chest.

Was I really up for it?

And then I looked out the window. And I saw this:

Photo: Sunset light over the mountains in Canmore, Alberta. 

Right.

“That’s why I do it,” I remembered.

To be there. In the mountains. In all that unconquerable, ineffable beauty; to simply, strangely, be.

Is it too hyperbolic to say that trip was life-changing for me? It was certainly one of my favourites (and I’ve been fortunate to have many.)

It was also one of the hardest. It challenged me physically. And it challenged me emotionally, asking me to move through fears and hesitations and things that, in other moments, would have made me stand still.

Photo: Me and my hiking buds crossing a steep(!) and exposed mountain. 

The ‘hardness’ made it awesome.

The most difficult day was one of the best I’d ever had.

I’ve written before about these moments: these inevitable seconds, or minutes, or days, or weeks when we ask ourselves, “will it be worth it?”

Or perhaps,

“Will I ever get there?”

I write about this because the truth is, it’s hard.

Storytelling is a kind of striving. Striving for clarity, striving for meaning, striving for impact, striving for honesty, striving for beauty, striving for understanding, striving for connection, striving to pull a vision into reality, or striving, simply, to get to the end when we don’t really know what the ‘end’ is, exactly.

It’s hard sometimes, writing and striving and creating and trying to make things better — or just trying to make things at all.

And this pandemic is hard too.

I know I'm finding it that way.

But I’ve found, in both work, and life, that somewhere in every effort and every hard part there eventually comes another kind of moment.

It’s that moment when we look around and feel something.

What is it? Joy, pride, fulfillment, knowledge?

Maybe it’s just the other side of striving.

The having of something we didn’t have before.

The opening up of a window. Watching the sky stretch into evening. And realizing, deep down, that we belong here.