I hiked a lot throughout my time in Arizona, until it seemed imprudent to go anywhere or see anyone or do anything at all. Instead, I’d walk down my host’s mile-long driveway at sunset, tracing my eyes along the outlines of the mountain peaks and watching the mountains fade from red to purple.
Now, after the fact, one particular hike stands out to me – a seven-mile jaunt that took me to the top of Coronado Peak and back down the mountain again. There truly was a special sort of accomplishment that came from walking to the top of a mountain and then gazing into Mexico, a whole other country that I still had only visited for a trip to the dentist.
There was also a fragility that came with the risk of being blown off a cliff by a strong wind.
That wind in Arizona! “Is it always this windy here?” I asked my host.
“Just in the spring,” she replied, “and the fall, summer, and winter.”
How my emotions oscillated that day. There were true jubilant, the-hills-are-alive moments, followed by rippling discontent at the pains of the past mixed in with worries about an unknown future, a really rancid cocktail that I just didn’t want to swallow.
Sometimes hiking really feels like a self-confrontation, letting the monkey mind run wild and cacophonous until it is exhausted and finally – finally! – still.
After that hike – the ascent, the descent, the wobbling legs as I tucked myself back into my car feeling more like jelly than a solid mass, the scalding ravenous hunger – it would not have surprised me to learn that I’d spent an entire lifetime on that trail, that I’d actually reached the end of my life and was somehow having a trippy, non-linear look back over the life I’d lived along with all the other lives I didn’t.
I’d like to pinpoint this as the moment where I decided to change, where, in the movie of my life, I’d proclaim, “This is it!” I see now that things are much more gradual, and often there is no exact moment of transformation. You just wake up, you go on the hikes, you feel the feelings, and, somehow and at some point, you settle down into yourself.
You do the right things, even when those tasks feel perfunctory and meaningless. But, lucky for you, growth and progress are cumulative. You read about habituation and cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness. You see small muscles begin to show in your arms. Your hair grows. Don’t you see? Nothing is stagnant.
You read verses like “the best is yet to come,” and you shift your thinking. Because you can. You can shift your thinking. All of this takes place on the span of a hike. You forget; you relearn your lessons and re-experience epiphanies you never cease to find as earth-shattering. You go on another hike, and another. And another.
You live a thousand lives on them, these trails. You are everyone and no one and, somehow by the end, you are yourself again, more yourself than you’ve been before, and maybe not quite as yourself as you might be someday.
With the pandemic, state and national parks closing, and travel being somewhat unwise currently, I haven’t gotten to lose myself in a forest lately. Sometimes I think that all my work and all my progress is for nothing. My memories of the mountains and forests have to suffice for now.
My younger brother said yesterday, "Seeds are not reaped in the same season they are sown.”
Sow the good seeds, be the good soil.
