The Next Adventure

The next adventure

Losing my job was not part of the plan, but neither was a global pandemic. Within days the world ground to a halt. My picture-perfect life began to crumble. No more adventures. No more income. No more visa.

An empty canvas.

The time has come to start again. Not quite from scratch, but once again it seems all uphill. Time to cut my losses, to go home, to regroup and figure out the next step… the next big adventure.

Perfection is finite. I hope I made the most of it while I had it. I hope it will come again. The unknown that lies ahead scares me, but it’s also a rare opportunity to hone in on exactly what I seek.

For the time being, I spend my days finding beauty once again in the mundane, in the everyday. Filling time with yoga, baking, learning, painting, and catching up with long lost friends. This is the time to embrace life without fear of missing out.

Look up at the stars, the sunrise and sunset. Listen to your breath, feel your chest rise and fall, make love, do a jigsaw, do another one (or ten), get to know your kids, your neighbours, your grandparents… See this as an opportunity to regroup, to find yourself again and when this is all over (and it will eventually pass), we’ll take to the streets once more and embrace the world and life with renewed vigour.

But perhaps as the months and years fly by and this all becomes a distant memory, please remember the lessons learned, the solitude, the empty streets and the blissful silence of the earth recovering…

It was not a good day that day when I heard the news, but after a few deep breaths and a little perspective, I know my world won’t really crumble. Instead, it’s an opportunity to radically alter my life once more for the better.

I will rise again. We will rise again.

Embracing Fear in the Mountains

How many times in a day, in a week, in a month do you feel fear? Like real fear, total loss of control and rationality, that all-consuming pressure that one wrong move could be fatal.

My life was nice. My life was normal. I was outdoorsy, adventurous and ‘fearless’. I was content but my life lacked something. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It lacked fire. It lacked fear. It was stable. I was stable. Stable and somewhat monotonous.

Then I met a mountain man and, all of a sudden, my life was fire and ice. Every moment became something exciting, something special. He introduced me to the mountains in a way that I never dreamed could be accessible to me.

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I took up three new sports; rock climbing, mountaineering and backcountry skiing. And under his tutelage, I became more alive than I’ve ever been. My stable range of emotions imploded and I tasted the tang of adrenaline, the tremor of knees, and fear, the likes that I’ve never known existed.

I’ve entered a world of no return. A world that terrifies and thrills me in equal measure. A world of snow-capped peaks, sheer cliff faces, of avalanches and crevasses, of chossy rock and snowy backcountry chutes. A world where fear grips me like a noose around the neck and makes me want to run home to my Mammy. A world that tells me that I’m not good enough, that I need to be better, that leaves me bruised and broken.

Yet there’s another side to it, a subtle one. That elusive feeling when you pull yourself on up onto a cliff ledge and put on your safety or the ski down that insane piste of fresh powder…. When you achieved that little feat that you never thought you could do. That moment when you’re regaining your breath, your mind is racing, you’re completely aware and in tune with your body and for one moment, everything is crystal clear.

And once you’ve tasted what life can truly be like if you move beyond your comfort zone. Well, there is simply no going back.

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