Everything I'm Not
In which a mountain climb goes wrong and right simultaneously
Happy New Year everyone! Been a long time hasn’t it? I’m happy to say that health issues aren’t to blame for this. Actually, I’ve steadily been getting better and better over the last few months, and what was semi-paralysing at the time I wrote this has since subsided into a chronic but manageable condition. No, the long gap is down to a combination of getting a part-time job at a college, keeping my proofreading going on the side, and getting back into playing live music (this kept me especially busy in December). Unfortunately energy levels are still an issue, and I’ve found that it’s been impossible to maintain all these pursuits, a social life and the blog at the same time.
The good news for The Small Dark Light is that I’m taking a step back from proofreading once the current assignment’s finished, and with the Omicron situation the way it is gigs have wound down for the foreseeable future too. So the hope is that in the months ahead I’ll be posting semi-regularly again. I’ve missed this.
The other week I decided to head out in the car and find somewhere where I could have a nice meal and get some writing done. But when I got outside and saw what a fine, sunny day it was — the kind of day you’re obliged to capitalise on when it comes your way in January — I decided on the spot that before I even thought about eating and typing I had to get in some driving and walking. I’m fortunate enough to live near any number of beautiful forests, mountains and nature trails, so I reckoned that if I just pointed south and kept driving, I’d see a sign that caught my eye before long.
Several kilometres and lots of Kanye West later, I come off the main road at a random point and find myself not far at all from a mountain I haven’t been to since I was a child, a mountain I’m going to call the Meatloaf because placeless anonymity’s fun and I like the song “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”.
I’d only been planning to wander through a forest for half an hour or so, not climb a mountain, but I like spontaneity and as I say, it was a particularly fine day. Climb the Meatloaf. Why not.
Drive through the little stone arch. Park up. Decide to leave all my stuff in the car, even the food — this thing looks pretty steep and I don’t want to lug anything around with me. This turns out to be a wise move.
Commence walking. Mud everywhere. Some of the puddles are pretty obvious, others are hiding away under clumps of grass. Not good for one of my best pairs of jeans. Even worse for my white-soled shoes. (Did I mention I hadn’t been planning to walk at all when I first set out, let alone tramp uphill through mud?) On I go.
The sun may be shining, but there’s also a ferocious wind immediately surrounding the Meatloaf, one of the strongest I’ve ever been in. It’s sheer, rocky going — a genuine climb as opposed to a vertical stroll — and sometimes I have to stop for a few seconds and hold onto something while a particularly strong gust passes. It’s not that the climb’s unsafe or requires any particular athletic endurance — it’s just kind of tedious. It’s also exhilarating. Whenever I start to get fed up I remind myself that even ambling along the foothills of this thing would have been unimaginable back in June. I’ve come a long, long way. Thank God.
Eventually I get to the top and am rewarded by stunning vistas in every direction. The sun’s breaking through the clouds in such a way that you can actually see the individual rays, which illuminate the fields below at different levels of intensity in a sort of patchwork quilt effect. I’m reminded of Lord of the Rings, and the scene in Shadowlands where C. S. Lewis and Joy finally reach the place portrayed in Lewis’ favourite picture. (Aside: the real C. S. Lewis couldn’t drive, so the scene’s as historically inaccurate as it is dramatically effective. Unfortunately that lapse in realism was enough to ruin the whole film for me, and now I’ll forever think of it as ‘the worst thing I’ve ever seen’. Ever since watching it I’ve dedicated my nights to dunking on C. S. Lewis fans in forums and posting anonymous one-star reviews of Anthony Hopkins’ oeuvre on Letterboxd. I jest of course. See Shadowlands.)
I linger at the top of the Meatloaf as long as I can, but eventually the fierce winds are too much for me and I prepare to head back down again. I elect not to go back the way I came, or to take the path that runs directly down the opposite side, even though it has a few things to recommend it: (1) that’s the way everyone else is going; (2) the path is steep but also straight; (3) you can see where it ends from up here, and also from every point along it — nothing jutting out, no detours. I weigh all these factors against the benefits of heading down the mountain’s north face: (1) no wind on that side. I head down the north face.
Bad mistake. What I thought would be a straightforward descent (straight down, turn right when I get to the bottom, be back where I started in 20 minutes) turns out to be nothing of the kind. This side of the mountain turns out to be deceptively shapeless and much, much wider across than it looks from above. Parts of it jut out at odd angles. It’s impossible to see where you’re going. And there’s no trail. Time after time I see something a little way off that looks like a trail, but it always turns out to be a random change of scenery: that’s not a stone path, it’s just a bunch of rocks; that’s not a grass trail, it’s just some clumps of grass. I’m supposed to be bearing to my right, but somehow I keep veering slightly left because the going’s easier that direction, not realising that along the way I’m not taking myself a little off course but way off course. (Ever gone for a sea swim, swum a tiny bit to the left or right and ended up so far away from your stuff you could hardly see it any more? That’s what it felt like.) Picking my way over the endless jagged rocks starts to get tiring and uncomfortable, my legs start protesting, my shoes and trousers get progressively muddier, and I start to worry about exactly how far I am from where I started and how long this whole process is going to take.
At long last I get to level ground and a path, so I quickly fire up Google Maps and almost do a double take when I see how far away the car park is. Still, as the great Lucretius teaches us, ‘It’s hard to get home without getting to your car first’, so I resign myself to my fate and start walking. Eventually I get to a fork in the path. No idea which way to go. My location tracker isn’t accurate enough out here to help me choose, and I worry that making the wrong decision could add half an hour to my journey. And it’s going to get dark soon.
Right then a couple come up behind me, which is kind of amazing because I haven’t met anyone else on the way down and don’t meet anyone afterwards. I ask them which way to go for the car park and their reply goes something like ‘What, the main car park? That’s an hour away! Go back the way you came, keep going straight and you’ll get to the nearby village. You can call a taxi from there and that’ll take you back to your car. Good thing we met you before it got dark or they’d have had to send a helicopter out.’ They were joking there. Sort of.
Anyway, I do as I’m told, get to a lovely pub with good food and nice Christmas decorations, have myself a well earned meal, get a taxi, get to my car and head home. I don’t get any writing done (the original point of my day trip, remember?), because of course I don’t have my laptop in the pub, by the time I’m reunited with it it’s too late to go anywhere else, and by the time I get home I’m too tired to do anything.
Still, I feel great on the drive back. I remind myself that (a) I climbed a mountain, when even driving towards it would have seemed daunting months ago; (b) I did the above after eating half a bowl of cereal, and didn’t eat another bite until I got to the pub many hours later; and (c) the whole thing was a lot of fun. Admittedly the ascent a lot more so than the descent, but even during the worst parts of that I’d been able to stand outside the situation a little, and project myself into the future just enough to start seeing the funny side I knew I’d see in retrospect. This seeing-the-present-from-the-perspective-of-the-future — a trick I’d highly recommend even to people who don’t share my wacky beliefs about the Illusion of Time, the Eternal Instant, or the Past, Present and Future Self Being One, Maaaaan — is one of my favourite mental health techniques.
But the thing that tickled me most about the day was that the person who went the wrong way down a mountain on a whim and added over an hour to their journey is the same person who climbed the mountain on a whim in the first place. The parts of myself I like and the parts that annoy me are intimately bound up with each other, so that I couldn’t wish away the annoying bits without getting rid of the stimulating bits too. It’s not just that we can’t get rid of our “worst” features, it’s that we shouldn’t: you can’t jettison any of the bathwater without the baby going with it. It’s what makes self-work such a subtle, and such an individual, process. Everyone is working with different potentialities and tweaking them in different directions so that they end up somewhere near the Golden Mean.
Thinking this way is slowly making me better at accepting myself.
So I’m driving home blasting some more Kanye, forgiving myself for the annoyances, delays and hassles my occasional impulsivity causes and thinking about all the fun I have the same trait to thank for. The playlist cues up “Everything I Am”.
‘Everything I’m not made me everything I am…’
Photo credits: Hu Chen, Timothy Chan, Tomasz Abramowicz and Liam Pozz, all on Unsplash
Great story that illustrates well the thought-provoking aphorism at the end