The other day I was asked why some people feel the need to climb mountains. Immediately what came to my mind was an innate need for adventure. To walk upon the earth and see new land. To discover and explore. But explore what, exactly?
There are a lot of reasons I go up. For one, the length of a mountain ascent seems to be the only physical activity that can really give me a solid night’s sleep—like, knockout sleep. And being on a mountain forces me to really set aside all of those “have-tos” that vie for my attention, constantly making me think I need to check my phone or crank out some administrative tasks. Mountains give me time to travel inward and meet me again. But beyond all that, I’m starting to think that climbing mountains is about one thing more than anything else: the search for stories.
When Stories No Longer Feel Like Stories
I love stories. I love learning something I didn’t know before, or hearing a tale that is original and creative. I love having a new experience because it awakens in me possibilities for what may come next. Perhaps a new book idea or a chance to visit someplace magical or meet a new, interesting person. Anything that can get me out of living “the same old story.”
Because the same old story doesn’t feel like a story anymore, does it? When life becomes an endless cycle of the same tasks, the same routines, the same “good morning, how are yous,” it feels less and less like you are living in the original screenplay that is your life. Your life begins to feel, rather, more like the conveyor belt at the airport carousel, and you’re the luggage waiting to be picked up.
Enter Mountains
But mountains help break that up in a very obvious way because they are too big to glaze over. Viewing the world from such a lofty perspective adds a specialness to your week. It gives you a story to fill your mind—one where you were the protagonist. Not someone else. Not some characters on a Netflix show or a novel you’re reading. Not some celebrity businessman you read about in the news. You. It’s your story. You went searching for something and saw something unique. You created a story that fills your imagination.
And who knows what you may find out there in the mountains? Maybe you run into a guy on the trail driving a yellow moped, or maybe you end up on a trail that’s been sabotaged by a man in a fight with the federal government. Maybe you get caught in a storm and have to turn back. But whatever you find, you lived a new story, and that opens your mind to other ideas and stories when you’re back home, coping with the regular grind of work and dirty dishes.
One Step Leads to More
This opening—this expansion of possibility—is the same principle as when you are staring at an overwhelming amount of work, and you don’t know where to begin. You get paralyzed and delay starting any of it because it feels like it will never get done. But then you focus on one thing and start chipping away at it, and before you know it, you’re halfway done with this mountain of work you had. Now it doesn’t seem so hard to keep going forward.
Well, with stories, it kind of works like that as well. You break free of the cycle of routine you’re on and go seeking one new story. Just one. You go out and experience one mountain. Or one show with friends. Maybe you take a kayak out on the ocean or pursue a class that might help you learn something you want to build or better understand. You just take one step towards anything, and the search for more stories gets a whole lot easier to imagine.
One Story Gets Another
Recently, a new friend came about as a direct result of my own quest for stories. After a few great conversations, she sent me a short video that her daughter made for college. I really enjoyed it, and you can find it here. I won’t spoil it, but the film references Christopher McCandless, the protagonist from Jon Krakauer’s famous biography Into the Wild.
McCandless, if you haven’t read the book, dies after going on an American walkabout in Alaska. He wanted to reconnect with nature and live off the land. Unfortunately, things went awry, but this film honors the sentiments that drove him to explore in the first place. It examines how so many feel that “need to run away to find themselves”—an impulse I think most of us go through at some point in our lives. That need to go “out there” to find out what’s “in here.”
It’s why we take road trips with our friends, say yes to a weekend adventure somewhere new, and take risks. It’s why some of us climb mountains. Because how do you find out about yourself if you don’t test your limits? If you don’t see what different parts of the world are all about? Or what different people are all about? How the sky looks from somewhere else?
But Why the Search?
But why the need to search at all? Maybe it’s because life looks a lot different than it did just a few hundred years ago. My house was built in 1810 and was the first house in town to have a working toilet. A toilet! That’s just a little over two hundred years ago. Before that, even going to the bathroom was an adventure! Maybe that’s why Thoreau wrote Walden in 1854. By then, with access to running water and toilets, inns that served food, and cold ice storage to keep his food safe, life was starting to get too humdrum. He felt disconnected from the kind of hardships that test the brain and fill the mind with discovery. At least that’s what it sounded like he was saying—he lost me more than once during some of his tangents.
And getting back to McCandless, it sounds like there may be more than one reason for his need to explore, as I recently learned he was the victim of abuse, according to a book his sister wrote. But when you peel back the layers of any of the causes that lead us to explore, I think what you’ll find at the root of everything is the search for not just a story, but the story. The one that tells us what life’s all about. The search for meaning beyond automated conveniences that make us feel dead inside. And maybe Chris was okay with death before he even set out, because he felt dead inside from what society had given him—a life of prescribed customs and inescapable abuse.
Into the Wild, Then and Now
I’ll tell you, when I first read Into the Wild, I hated it. I was eighteen and I thought it was kind of bullshit. I thought Chris had a death wish and was frankly, suicidal. I didn’t have much empathy for that. But I picked it up a few years ago and read it with a different lens. The one that asked, “what was this really all about?” The one that overlooked Chris’s missteps and focused on his curiosity. The one that asked, “what was Chris looking for?” And when I did that, I rather enjoyed the book. I got it. I got the search. The desire to connect with something bigger and to feel that you can rely on yourself should society fail or falter.
I recognized for the first time a bit of myself in Chris. Perhaps not in the manner in which he took unnecessary risks, but in the need to take some risk. To challenge oneself. To do something others think is unreasonable or scary. To live some experience beyond the hamster wheel of modern convenience. To be a part of some story. To change our story. To live something that lets us know we are alive.
“Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.” ― Jack Kerouac
In other words, go find a story.
