Lately with the chaos in the news, A.I. as a potential threat, foreign conflicts, oil prices rising, environmental protections being removed, it feels like every time I head out onto the trail I’m weighed down by this burden of thought—this wonder about how am I going to save the world enough to protect my children from the dangers in it. Too much for one man to take on alone.
As a father, from the second my kids were born, a new instinct to fiercely protect was born at the same time. But my DNA was ready for bear attacks or street hoodlums—not a rapid technological shift that needs me to worry about online predators or scam artists. My DNA clearly also wants me to be on the move, and yet again, society has mucked things up, dictating that most jobs now require us to sit down and work on a computer. After a few days of reading emails, writing contracts, and mitigating risks in the cyber world, I’m a coiled mess, ready to go bounding off into the wilderness.
Which is where peakbagging comes in. As an adult, life kicks you around pretty good and we don’t have the physical outlets or the time that our kids do, to relieve that stress. We don’t have high school sports or summers off. No daily time allotted for exercise. When you really consider the ample amount of time our kids have to wander and play, while us adults go from eight hours at the desk to a few hours on the couch after dinner, is it any wonder why we are physical wrecks? As a culture, we really screwed up. While we were so busy coming up with computers and email to make work supposedly more “efficient,” we sure goofed up when it comes to getting adults the exercise they need.
And sure, you could take up pickle ball or go running around the track. You can take up swimming or go for walks. But is that enough? It’s not for me. As I type this, I can feel my hamstrings tightening up and the impulse to get up and sprint taking over. And while it would be fun to take up tennis, my soul craves something bigger. Something different. I want to run up a gawddang mountain so I can feel like I did something outside the hamster wheel of life. Something big. Something glorious.
Sometimes you just need a win, and the beauty of peakbagging is that no matter how bad the conditions, how ugly the terrain, or how terrible the view is when you get to the top, at the top of every mountain you feel like you did something special. Something unique that says, “my life will not be ordinary.” It makes the mundane machinations of modern living tolerable because you stepped away from it, and now see how you can step away from it again whenever you need to. You can incorporate the epic with the humdrum, doing what you have to not in lieu of a life less ordinary, but to serve it.
Hmmm. Okay, yeah, it’s time for me to find another mountain to climb.