Why a cook hikes, a hiker writes, and a writer cooks
--
Life was easier, back then in my 20s. I had dreams, many of them, but I also had a job. I worked evenings, went to Uni during the day, and spent my limited free time either studying for my next test or sleeping away the work induced stress. Dreams, I figured, would always remain dreams. Something to hold on to when the sun set and the seagulls would come into the harbor to scavenge a days’ fishing remains.
I’d had my “wild years,” I thought. I’d left work behind, traveled the world, worked short bursts with interesting and amazing people, lost and found myself in a dirty street in one of the shadier parts of Hong Kong, fell in and out of love in India, and had a fist fight with a real life pirate from Greece in a bar in Belize. That was it. I’d work, study, finish, settle, make money, produce a statistical 1.3 offspring with a woman I’d be married to for 8.79 years before separating and remarrying the partner in whose loveless marital embrace I’d die at 73 years of age for perfectly normal reasons.
Obviously that’s not me today. I write this from a bench, 8159.45 feet above sea level, staring down into the foggy abyss I just crawled out of, sweaty and cursing, having taken the northern approach even after being told it’d be strenuous and not very scenic. I am an idiot that way.
I’m about to move into my dream home, a converted former farm house with many nooks and crannies to explore and build out, a basement bar, an airy office overlooking the Taunus mountains, and about 900 kilometers of mountain biking paths winding around climbing and hiking locations.
I am Tarzan, swinging from liana to liana, grabbing the vines of my expertise with one hand, holding on to new experiences and things to learn until I feel comfortable letting go of the familiar. I take risks, leaving everything behind and just walking 900 kilometers or (finally) lugging my fat ass and my dreams up a mountain to write this from its top.
Here’s the thing, though: I am happier than I’ve ever been. “Dang, Mikka, you’re changing your life faster than the Duggars their excuses,” stopped fazing me a long while ago. “Ah, that’s Mikka, no one knows what he does but he has nice stories,” too. Where once the monolithic career trajectory stood, from cook to student, to cooking soldier and coding cook, is now a wonderful, beautiful, fluency. One that, screw mindfulness, I don’t want to “feel” or analyze, I just want to ride.
I’ve learned more about myself in the past year and a half than I did before. I’ve learned that I can be brought to tears by a task that seems unsurmountable. I’ve learned that I can go for 48 hours to get a project done that most more experienced or younger (and therefore nimbler) of my peers could do in a quarter of the time.
More than anything, though, I’ve relearned to fight for knowledge on one hand and acceptance on the other. As a cook I am a greybeard, an eminence, a known factor. I am respected not for my current work but for the time I’ve spent doing it. Few question me in that arena because, yah, I am that silverback. Now I am a newbie again. Every day I become a new FNG, a newbie, a probie, a seeker. And it feels hellagood to have the greybeards ponder your suggestions or inspect your work and nod. Not because “he can’t be wrong, he’s the Mikka,” but because I prove it.
I’ve learned that I can write. Not amazingly well, but enough to be read by a few. I’ve learned that I don’t need things I believed were absolutely necessary. And I’ve learned that, no matter where I stand in life, the cold shower of realization that I am completely out of my element, lost, and have to acquire foreign skills and knowledge quickly, is amazing.
Today, I am a cook that writes, a writer who hikes, and a hiker who cooks. I swing from liana to liana, and damn do I enjoy the everloving crap out of it.
