Going up the mountain
Life is a journey.
This probably goes without saying for some of you, and I'm sure that is possessed of both positive and negative context. But, so too, are the smaller quests we undertake within the greater context of actually living - you know, those plans and schemes we imagine, devise and actually plod along through. The Great Work of our lives, also, is very much a path, a direction.
That seems to lie in subtle contrast to that old line - life is what happens while you're busy making plans.
It's been an interesting year; one that has required me to pause and reflect - and while I don't love all the things that I've discovered, I think it highly preferable to leaving those things to fester and cause me to stumble, or worse. It's certainly made me take some healthy perspective on my life, and what I do with it.
If you're here, you know I'm a writer - you may even know I'm a musician. You probably know I'm a father and a husband and can effectively extrapolate that I'm a son and a brother and all of that. But my mind has lately been in the Himalayas, with the rugged sherpas that help guide travelers up the deadly slopes of the tallest mountains on the planet.
Oh, I know, it's never them we celebrate, right? We laud those foreigners who pay them to lead and guide and help them get to the mountaintop, but not the people who actually get them there. So, yes, it's a bit random, but that's where my brain is today. On a fantastic view of the world, from somewhere around the top of the world, wondering how I got here.
Well, the answer is a long one, and to be honest, I'm not done with the journey yet. And I don't even know if I'm the foreigner or the sherpa. But what I do know is that I have to remember all the people who have helped me along this journey. All of this - any little bit of it - has always been because someone else believed in me: either by picking me up when I had fallen, or through their words that held me up when I had fallen alone.
Who is your sherpa? Who got you where you are today?
Remember them. And thank them.