Saturday, September 29, 2012

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Never blame the mountain.

Where am I now?

It has been an uncomfortable few weeks. Physically, I have been housed, fed and warm. Outside the sun has been shining like some endangered creature allowing the people of Squamish a rare privilege of its presence.

Mentally, I have been trembling on a gully wall, watching rocks whip down from pressures and the winds around me. I have been getting cold again, shivering and soaked to the bone.  Multiple events have added up to produce that horrible and helpless black hole question of why? which when spoken just floats away, stolen from your lips. Why me? why now? Why at all?  For the first while I assume that friends can give some kind of solace or maybe science can explain these things, but at the end of the day, the 'why' monster remains. Creating this fragile and cowering being of myself.

I rolled over this morning after some really strange and realistic dreams about trying to surf on a flimsy board in an ocean with no waves and I flipped up the screen. On a different kind of surf I came across this video: Echoes, in which Nick Bollock explains with great conviction his choices in life.

It reminded me of what is and what isn't.

You can never, ever blame the mountain. That will get you no where. Events in your life do not have soul, or intention. The people do, or at least you might hope they do, but none of them are within your command, most of the time outside my understanding too. The only choice that I really have, the only question I really need to ask; is how? How will I deal with this? how will I build from it? How can I react, analyze, learn, grow and inevitably callus.

I am attempting to run that whole track. If I was on a physical mountain, would I just curse at the rain and the wind and allow those happenings that are outside my control? Would I allow them to stunt my growth and my progress? or would I take control of my battered ego, and alter my direction and my goals to find a new way, a new challenge in this storm. Getting down seems too easy, I have to find my way back up.

Game on.

This is not me, as I took it. But it is a perspective I value.