Climbing My Mountain (On the False Promise of Timelines)
piercing through the veil of self-deception - it's really always something
In the past few months I have taken to climbing Ryan Mountain often — quite often, multiple times a week often.
Some might say I am doing this obsessively, whereas really I am doing this anxiously (stressy & depressy vibes).
Sometimes trying to find something.
Sometimes trying to lose something.
Always something though.
(And isn’t it truly, always, something?)
Ryan Mountain is the highest point in Joshua Tree National Park, 14 miles as the crow flies or a roundabout 33 minute drive from my house. At his top (my understanding is that the mountain’s spirit does in fact identify as a him), he measures 5,496 feet. Ryan Mountain Trail captures 1,050 feet of this incline in a short 1.5 miles, a sassy 3 mile loop up and down. Joshua Tree is the high desert, lest you forget, so even at it’s base you’re at elevation; even at it’s base, you’re high up enough to see.
I started climbing Ryan Mountain because it was hard, and I needed the cardio, and my friend Lily had been doing it and I love Lily (so why not be like Lily?), and honestly because I recently switched gyms and my new one doesn’t have a Stairmaster (fail) and this ass ain’t gonna lift itself (30s!).
The trail is hard enough to clear your head: an all-but-pure Stairmaster-style incline that is especially taxing if you take a speedy clip. With the exception of a short section immediately before the summit, none of it is flat, and all of it is exposed — right now to the cruel winter winds and later in the year to the hot summer sun. The trail loops around the summit slowly showing you, step by step, the 360 degree views that will pour over you, all at once, at the top. It’s not lost on me that while I spin out mentally, I physically choose to spin around this mountain. There’s something there, always something. And there’s something to my increasingly desperate need to summit — to see if I can find some sort of clarity once I get to the vantage point where I get to see it all.
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Last week I came back from a 5-day silent meditation retreat and I have been thinking about timelines. First, you should know, that I despise people with timelines. And, after sitting silently in stillness, finally letting the past few months catch up with me, I have come to realize: I am a person with timelines. Despite my free-spirited nature, the fearlessness to which I abandoned my former life and started over at 31, my desperate clinging to freedom and dreaming and finding what is true and real instead of what is expected — underneath it all is a desperate clinging to a timeline and all that it represents.
Underneath all that, still, is a fear that I have fallen behind — that I will never catch up, that what is for me has missed me. Underneath my belief in divine timing and the proverbial process, was fear — deep, deep fear. Oh how we deceive ourselves! “The work” really is the unraveling of perceived self-understanding in an ongoing attempt to get at least a glimpse of, self-truth. Ugh.
In a world of uncertainty timelines gave me some semblance of control. Of sequencing. Rationality. Of this will happen, then this, then this. Of things working out ‘as planned.’ A thread I could hold onto (for dear life) in the gaping abyss of the future. But none of this is real; nothing is promised, all of this imagined — yet to happen, perhaps never happening, a sweet trick of self-deception to give myself momentary comfort. What plan? There is no plan. There was never a plan.
“Moha, or delusion, is one of the Buddha’s three poisons,” said my teacher. “All of this: timelines, expectations, where you should be and what you expect of people, all of this in many ways, lives in the realm of delusion. This is coming off as harsh, but I mean this in the most loving way: you are dealing with your own self-deception.”
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I always find answers on the mountain. The insights seem to spring spontaneously, a voice in my head, a note from soul of land to soul of woman. I wish I could say I write these lessons myself, sprung from my own mind and wisdom, but I do not. I just record them; it’s the elements that share their gifts. Sometimes the lessons are from the wind and how it shifts, sometimes from the stones and how they balance, perfectly but precariously. Sometimes it’s the fire in my heart from the cardio, begging me to keep going despite what is burning down, and sometimes it’s the expansive sky at the top, reminding me that all these things are so small, so so small, in this grand family of things. Sometimes it’s just simply the call to climb the mountain and my ability to listen to it.
That is it, isn’t it? Aren’t we all constantly being called to climb our mountain?
Some days, like yesterday, I leave the summit with no clear answers. I sit on a rock contemplating the desert, the trees, the crows in the distance. I let the cold wind chap my lips and listen intently, wondering what message it has for me today. As I sit, the darkness descends and the temperature drops. I curse myself for starting my hike too late. It feels eerily familiar; I have brought this on myself. I contemplate timelines.
I grasp for my own metaphors in the pregnant silence of the mountain’s voice. And in its absence, I leave and begin my descent back to reality. Taking care as I step down, downwards, contemplating at least the sweat and perhaps my movement (at least I am moving, right?), beginning to lose sight of myself… but then an answer does come, in the form of my favorite sliver of moon above the brightest desert sunset.
I realize I have never seen sunset on Ryan Mountain. I’m always too nervous about the cold and the darkness, too much in a rush to finish at a reasonable time. I’m always too early.
The answer comes. An answer that reminds me I am not late — I am perfectly on time. A tiny waxing crescent, my favorite moon, the small sprout of light pushing up through the darkness of newness, the phase immediately after the new moon. Barely noticeable, but strikingly there.
Yes, an answer comes that reminds me I am not late — that only this timing, my timing, could have resulted in this beauty. This, it is truly divine.
I suppose the answers we seek are sometimes less overt and more subtle sweetness. Sometimes all that is asked of us is just to be, to appreciate that we are, where we are, when we are, and that that allows you to witness this. Whatever the this is today. Whatever this is on mountain you are here to climb.
Thanks for being here. The above essay was seeded by my most recent Instagram post. If you’re not already following along there, please do!