Lifestyle

A Mountain to Climb

#adventure, Life, Lifestyle, meditations, Musings, philosophy, Travel

Everyone has their own mountain to climb, though it doesn’t have to mean the thing we usually ascribe to it. A mountain to climb, in the ordinary sense of the term, denotes something onerous, a task dreaded. I have a mountain to climb if I’m to get that doctorate. Britain will have a mountain to climb if Brexit goes through. You’ll have a mountain to climb if you don’t pull your finger out. So no question, meant in this regard a mountain to climb ain’t necessarily a good thing. A pejorative term, you might call it.

I was pretty convinced that I had had it with climbing mountains. Now, don’t get me wrong, those of the real variety, now one doesn’t too readily tire at the thought of yet another. One doesn’t have to be an Alpinist to love roaming the mountains, these mountains of rock and ice. They are, I hope you’ll agree, high above the realm of the unwelcome. They inspire again and again and again, and seen from all angles they are fractal, smaller triangles into smaller triangles and everything adding up to the magic number. But those mountains ain’t the problem; it’s the ones only we homo sapiens sapiens conceive of in our minds as more than the folded heaps of landmass that they really are, they are the problem. They warp and gorge, play on our fears. They grow more than a fingernail’s length per annum, which is faster than the Himalaya. Some grow so fast they block out all of life’s sunbeams in the cold light of morning. You might say therefore only the foolhardy and the masochistic among us savour their place at the bottom of any one of life’s metaphorical mountains of the mind, looking up at the soaring reality facing them. This i assumed to be eternal in our reckoning. Then i awoke.

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What I woke up to this morning was a minor epiphany. I realised, a little later while walking the dog, that what was preoccupying me was that me out there enveloped in that unquestionably beautiful location, taking it all in with the wonderment of a seven year-old staring at a non-linear equation, I realised i was bored silly and instead of scaling the walls what i truly needed was another mountain to climb.

Is it wiser that sharp intake of breath, or the lung-deflating exhalation that doubles as a weary sigh? Humans are at their best when they have something to go for. We, they, whichever pronoun you opt for, endure as predators of the lower Palaeolithic, sights locked on to an object worth risking life and limb for. When humans are honed for action they take small and sharp, but nevertheless significant, intakes of breath; just enough to power the muscles and the brain into coordinating, and carried by that motive force of energy their attentions are fixed on something other than themselves. Man the hunter does not give a weary sigh unless that evermore-daring object of his attentions slips from his grasp. When primed, focussed and ultimately content he lies in wait listening for regularity, for stillness, in his breathing. He sees his quarry grazing but alert, its ear cocked for the slightest disturbance. But a slow, rhythmic respiring he earns only by having a purpose in that very moment. Minus that purpose, either he sighs or else his heart beats liked a fucked clock on account of the modern ill of anxiety. 

Three Lonesome Peaks

 

I‘ve got this unique opportunity right now to do sweet Fanny Adams – any damn thing i choose within reason, come to think of it – and all the serotonin and dopamine i can squeeze from my hypothalamus (is that where neuro-magic dust is made?) comes from a deep desire to do something new and worthwhile. Project done, time to be a new seeker. There are people out there who would bite my hand off for three months of languishing in heavily comfortable surrounds reading novel after novel, sipping hot infusions and watching swans glide by. The drudgery of forced employment being superfluous to requirements in this case. But not everyone is a tortured soul it would seem. The soul must be inherently tortured to be forever malcontent. This is my lot. 2019’s project deadline has about matured. 2019, the year that was, is still just about, nearing the big sleep. Yours truly needled by restlessness. Another event scored off on the roster of a fleeting life in the cosmic scheme of things. Boxes ticked, in the sense that any life really worth living consists of one small but hugely meaningful milestone after another. There’s an afterglow in this here valley of attainment but mine is not to bask in that afterglow. There’s a little hump on the horizon, way out there forty days and forty nights walk from here. It’ll be hard reaching even the foothills, but, man, isn’t that a prerequisite of anything worth doing? 

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We all need mountains to climb; at least once in a while or in my case constantly. Only from their summits can the flag of achievement be planted and the next mountain espied, and the one beyond that and beyond that, ad absurdum. We have absolutely no choice but to press on. What is there otherwise? The time for reflection is later when the armchair becomes the means in itself. Keep striving, for when you stop you might as well stop for good.

A Bear Necessity

#adventure, America, Britain, California, forest, giant trees, human mind, Islam, Life, Lifestyle, nature, Psychology, redwoods, Reflections, trees, Uncategorized, United States

In Disney’s Jungle Book, Baloo sung that Bear Necessities were simple. But who was Baloo trying to kid, other than a clueless Mowgli? There is nothing simple, psychologically-speaking, about what a bear necessitates. When you are deep in the back country of, say, North America, what the bear necessitates in the human mind is a whole lot of panic and angst. Yet, is the anxiety that the wild things exert on the fragile human – the same human who is primordially at home and at the same time disturbingly out of place in her ancestral canopy home – confined to the prospect of coming upon an irate mother bear? Or are anxieties little knots made into strings we wear around our necks through life? The Inca people had their quipu, or talking knots, to record the particulars of their life. Equally, do postmodern humans have this string of knots in their psyche (or possibly even lodged their panic-rising breast) where something angst-inducing must reside just to remind us of our all-too humanness?

Walking through these American woods in all their dizzying expanse, I used to think that’s where the nagging feeling of anxiety permeated, and it was there that we urbanites would add another string to our quipu of worries. Streetwise and untroubled, enter the forest alone. Once there, duly adorn the knotted string around the neck. Venture ever deeper in and feel as the string pulls heavier on the neck. Watch as our quipu of worries keeps adding knots to its length with every snap of bone-dry twig. With each falling shadow forming grasping arms from tree limbs, feel our own limbs stiffen as another knot miraculously appears on the anxiety string. Stare into the multidimensional wall – for that is what the forest is when you are in it – and feel unease as is stares back at you. They say it’s the people roaming the woods you need to worry about in America, and not the black bears. And yet, fear being irrational – and that fear extends to fear of cougars, too – we don’t see it that way. We see the ancient brain kick into gear, the one that offers only binary choice: fight or flight. The subconscious gallery of wild, wicked animals, whom we used to prey on when we were not busy running from them, revolves at a pace matched only by the quickening of the human heart. But, it might not be as simple as bear panic anxiety existing only in the deepest reaches of the American woodlands. Fear of what’s in them-there woods might be a bare necessity for us in order to function out here in the societies we made from the ruins of the mesolithic world of cave bears, sabre tooth cats, and aurochs. Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. Bears don’t instil fear in the woods; fear instills fear because anxiety is what we had to nurse just to leave that wild world behind to become the worrywarts we did.

Later, I told others i was suffering a newly-diagnosed condition: bear panic anxiety. I even slept in the car out there in the woods lest i end up a snack wrapped in tent canvas. Others laughed mockingly, never stopping to think about how their own predatory instincts would dissolve in the midst of aloneness in a vast sea of trunks. When i returned to the American West the following year, i traded experience for caution. The anxiety held firm as it had the year before, as it had when i was young and terrified of the deep. And then, leaving it again to rejoin my tamed world, I realised that anxiety is a shapeshifting form within each of us that needs filling with something, anything that is, unless we happen to have trained the mind to excise those knotted worry beads from deep within our psyche into our fingertips where we may toy with them and master them. And what triggered that realisation? It was going to live on a riverboat that hammered the point home. Now, instead of feeling bear panic anxiety in America, i was growing demented from feeling boat panic anxiety. Boats and bears? Is this merely alliteration disguised as a tenuous link? Tame English canals versus American wilderness? Well, the connection is not as stretched as you might think. The boat, built long and wide and stocky for a river, was squeezed into a narrow, shallow and popular canal in a picturesque corner of olde England. For every holiday boat that inched past mine (and they were legion, depressingly so), the same set of psychological conditions i felt in the American wilderness came back to haunt me. In short, the inbuilt worry space was occupied again. The canal seemed to grow narrower and the passing boaters more intrusive. Wave after wave of prying eyes, faces moving past the portholes so close I could plant a kiss on them. For every time i raised my head above the parapet, another narrowboat would come into view. Privacy on short notice; another holidaymaker enjoying me as a caged novelty item. Anxiety filled the space the bear had hibernated in. Panic rose in the breast and i thought to myself, Here we go again. Not another one! It’s gonna hit. No way can it pass.’  How can the mind be stilled when the water on which the riverboat sits is rippling with excitement at yet another boat brushing millimetres by?

Bear and boats, Inca knots recording the state of our psychology, and of course worry beads. I know now why Muslims the world over run the beads between their thumb and forefinger. While the rest of us internalise ours, those carefree Muslims have externalised theirs. They’ve taken each knot of anxiety and locked it in an onyx bead where these worries can be controlled in those all-conquering fingers. The bear might thankfully still live in the woods where it belongs. The boats still squeeze between the shrinking width of the canals. And you? Where does your anxiety live? Or have you managed banish the knots into your fingers where they don’t loom so large?