Note To Self: These Days All Count
The other night on a zoom call, this question was posed–Are you more about process or more result-oriented? I said process was way more interesting to me than result, citing Robert Pirsig’s notion that real life is on the sides of the mountain.
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he wrote “When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it’s a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. That’s never the way.”
In our zoom breakout sessions, however, we were to take on the role of arguing for the opposite point of view, so I said when I was on Denali in 1986 it was all process, all climbing. You only get to stand on the summit for a few, short, cold minutes. But why else would we go to Alaska other than to attempt the summit? It gave shape to everything else. We wouldn’t be enticed to go there and just “hang out” on glaciers and build igloos for latrines and practice ice arrests and piss into a bottle in our sleeping bags without some kind of goal. Joseph Campbell talked about having “something silly to do” out in front of you to strive after.
Later, as we debriefed (after one more breakout regarding what’s the cost to you of being too oriented one way or the other), I said writing, to me, is all process right now and I don’t have a Denali summit giving shape to it. I’m on some sort of plateau, like when we were stuck at 14,000 feet by a blizzard and couldn’t climb for five days. What’s my new Denali? Even if I don’t make the summit, the process is where the life is.
I couldn’t help but turn the spotlight of that question toward how I am being in this current worldwide reality. A friend of mine said that it’s similar to how a cross country flight with young children might occur. All about getting to the other coast, all about survival. I felt that way at work yesterday, unaccountably down a pint. Everything takes longer right now, wearing masks and fogging up glasses and trying to hear what someone is saying and putting on and taking off gloves and getting temperatures taken and cleaning work stations.
It was a slog, not unlike how on the mountain all I could do sometimes was count steps, thousands of them, staring at the climbing rope sliding mercilessly through the snow in front of me, imagining only how great it would feel to stop and just lie down and go to sleep. Times like that I didn’t look around much at the sublime all around me. I just wanted it to be over, to make it to the end of the day.
Yet there was a still small voice of counsel, whispering to remember that these days all count. The life is here, not out there at the end of this and there’s value in not sleeping through it, even if we have to count steps some days. As Rumi put it, centuries ago, “The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep.”
