Life Lessons From The Mountainside
You may have noticed that I spent much of January and February up a hillside. I walked every day that it wasn’t completely pouring with rain. I studied the map and walked every route from the front door at least twice. I started January with a bit of a pant going up a slope, and ended February 783m up a mountain.
Not to get too Disney channel about it, but most of what I’m taking away from my winter of walking is what I found out about myself. You know I love a metaphor, and as I frowned at the map and rearranged my ill-advised jumpers and doubted my capabilities I couldn’t help but notice just how bloody relevant this all was to life. As I began to learn to walk, I began to learn to live.
So, here are the metaphors which have stuck with me and might be helpful to you too.
When I look at a map I go the wrong way
Every damn time. I’ll think the path goes one way and then I’ll check the OS app and I’ll second guess myself and head off in a different direction which turns out to not be the right way at all. You could argue that this is more to do with my map-reading skills or insufficient data for the app to work properly but here’s the thing. When I wasn’t trying to follow a prescribed route, I had a better time. When I just took off up the hill and followed the track I felt drawn to and read the landscape to avoid the bogs and didn’t check the map I was more than capable of getting around, and these were my favourite walks – where I was making my own tracks rather than following someone else’s.
Body over mind
When I set off up the mountain my mind was not ok. “It’s too hot”, “my back hurts”, “I shouldn’t have brought this coat”, “this is too much for me, I’m not going to be able to do it”. All of it swirling around and around. I was stopping every fifty metres because I was convincing myself I was struggling. But when I dropped into my body, when I actually focused on my legs – they were fine. They weren’t hurting at all, just patiently waiting for me to chill out and get on with it. So every time my mind started chattering after that I dropped into my body and every time my body said “we got this”. The truth isn’t in your mind, it’s in your body – that’s where to listen.
The fear isn’t real
I psych myself out. I will be totally fine and feel totally safe and then for some reason I ruin it for myself by imagining the wind will blow me off the top of a relatively flat peak. Or that if I take one more step I’ll fall down an invisible mine shaft. Or that I might slip on a rock and then my shin will break in half. And when I get these thoughts I go a bit dizzy and wobbly. I sit down on the floor and can’t get up because the wind is definitely going to blow me over the edge (I mean, what am I, a leaf?!) and my panic means that it is more likely that I will slip (but probably only get a bruise in reality). These fears are ludicrous, and they make the whole journey harder for no reason – if you choose to believe them.
Don’t look at the top
The more you look at the top, the more depressed you get. When you are constantly checking where the summit is it never gets any closer and you never feel like you’re making any progress towards it. Your legs hurt more and it feels like so much more of a slog when you don’t feel you’re making progress. But, when you look at the next few metres in front of you, when you stop and look back down, when you look at the view, you feel a bit more like you’re really doing it. And when you’ve not looked up for half an hour, suddenly the summit looks so much closer than it did before. Keep an eye on where you’re going, but don’t focus on it so much that you don’t appreciate what you’re doing right now.
Do it because you like yourself
Don’t do it because you want to be thin, don’t do it because you think you should, don’t do it to impress someone else, don’t do it because everyone else is doing it, don’t do it to share the pics – do it because you promised yourself you would. Do it because you are proving to yourself that you can rely on you. Do it because you are showing yourself you believe in you.
You are more capable than you think
“Oh I could never do that” has been my default for a long time. I’d drive around looking at these mountains assuming that they were not available to me, that I would never go up them because I just wasn’t capable. By accident I took a path that was rather more vertical than I’d expected and realised that I was pretty much level with the summit on the other side of the valley that I had thought was out of my reach. I was capable. That turned “I could never” to “well let’s see” – when I stopped assuming I couldn’t do something it turned out I actually could. (Sometimes things are easy when you don’t approach them like they’re hard).
