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our lives are filled with many moments and chances to be brave, if only we allow ourselves to actually notice those moments and to grab hold of them before they pass.
“Enough,” I say quietly. “You need a mindset change.”
Why am I out here? Why am I doing this? Why does anyone do anything?
“Breathe in peace, breathe out pain,” I whisper. I do this over and over and over, and somehow it works. “Breathe in peace, breathe out pain.”
I am alone, utterly and completely alone, and I take a moment to assess my needs. What do I need in this moment?
This is one of the best things about long-distance hiking, I realize: the ease and simplicity of recognizing your body’s basic needs, and the joy you feel as you are able to meet each one.
The Surrender Experiment, by Michael Singer. There’s one line in particular that stops me, and I re-read it again and again. In talking about a tough time in his life, Singer says, “I was willing to face loneliness and fear and not grab for relief.”
This is how you do it, I think. This is how you become the new version of yourself: you start where you are and then you just keep going, no matter what.
“Just keep not quitting,” I tell myself.
As the trail begins to climb I think about something my friend Lauren said to me a few years ago: that it’s a privilege to be able to choose your suffering.
Dan Harris that’s pinned up above my desk back home: “It is not the pain that is intolerable, but your resistance to it.”
it’s just that change and growth often happen so slowly that we don’t notice we’re getting stronger until we look behind us and realize that we’ve outlasted our old selves long enough to become our new selves,
that’s how we grow: by doing one small thing at a time that we never thought we’d be brave enough to do.
Do we just always want the opposite of whatever we already have?
How is it, I wonder, that even if it’s not what we thought we wanted, we always seem to get exactly what we need?
As I hike, I think about the Pema Chödrön quote that I’ve held in my heart for the past 44 days, and I recite it to myself one final time. “Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.”
