Life is absurd but….
I watched 14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible during a trainer ride recently. A popular first question I ask people when I want to get to know them is If you could do anything with a 100% guarantee of success what would you do? My answer has always been to climb K2 followed by Everest. This was pre-Everest becoming the scene it has been for the better part of a decade now. Part of what bonded Mary and I was our love for mountains and the idea of climbing the impossible. She would have LOVED this documentary. It is filled with all things amazing and, in my mind, heroic. We would have long discussions about the Nepali people, Sherpas, and the lack of acknowledgement they have ever received for getting Westerners up Everest. The beauty and cruelty of the world’s highest summits. It always seemed like the perfect description of what life should be. Hard, painful yet joyful and an accomplishment when you get through the tough times.
In this documentary you will witness Nirmal Purja and his amazing Sherpa team not only do the seemingly impossible but do it with heart. They save fellow climbers lives and help a group of climbers who thought they could not summit K2 due to weather and conditions, summit. Did I mention it was with a smile?
Alas, I digress. I want to tell you about a quote from the Documentary. Famed climber Reinhold Messner towards the end of the film said this and it hit so deeply that I started to tear up.
“Most of us are forgetting that from the beginning of our life we are approaching death
Life is absurd but you can fill it with ideas
With Enthusiasm
You can fill your life with joy”
All of a sudden the frustration I had from waking up at 0230 but not getting on the bike until 3:30, the thoughts I had about how I was never going to make it to work on time, the voice in my head that said “this isn’t worth it” from the night before as I set the alarm for Zero God Awful Thirty all seemed trivial within an instant.
Every moment, every minute, every hour is a tick off the clock. What we do with our time matters. Obviously, anyone reading this most likely does not have the means or desire to go quit your job and climb mountains. Nor should you. But what if we all did something that WE truly love or have always wanted to do. What if half of us did something BIG. What if instead of being so afraid of failure we just took a leap of faith and decided to try. Could we be better friends, partners, spouses, coworkers to each other? Could we be better human beings? Could we see the world outside of out tiny scopes and find some compassion and empathy for each other? Hell, I wonder if we could all actually learn something that matters and be a little less close minded.
I am sure I am not the only one who hears the phrases “Well, I’m here aren’t I?”, “I am just trying to get through to retirement”, “Life sucks” or “why bother”. I have a hard time with the people behind these words. Maybe it is because now I have seen how quickly a life can disappear and the world keeps moving along. Maybe I have a renewed outlook on life and how fragile it is. To be honest I do not remember how I ever really felt before 2/13/21. I am pretty sure these comments have always frustrated me, but I am hearing them differently now. They hit me harder. They frustrate me more.
I started thinking about my goals and my BIG ideas. I am limited by health, finances, and ability but I still want so badly what I want. So, I will keep showing up at 0230. I will keep putting in the work. I will keep trying to focus on what seems impossible. If I fail, well it won’t be the first time. If I succeed, you will all hear about it. It certainly won’t be climbing K2, but it is MY version of K2.
More importantly, how great would it be to do this all with a smile. A genuine, happy, and grateful smile? I am fully aware that it is not possible to be happy all the time. Trust me I am painfully aware of that fact and that stems from something far deeper than the events of 2/12/21. I grew up hearing that everything is a waste of time. I grew up in a household that made me believe that I could and would accomplish nothing in my life. I grew up believing that we are all alive just to die. I was told and believed that I was not worthy of great things because I did not have it in me to be anything better than nothing. But time and a lot of attempts at self-love (still a work in progress) has slowly made me realize that I was never the problem and that those “truths” I heard growing up were nothing more than a reflection of the person who was saying them to me. They were her negative thoughts, and they did not have to be mine.
I will leave you with another great quote from Reinhold Messner:
“I came to realize that my path to knowledge would not lead me to libraries, professors, universities, and studies. My path to knowledge was through living life and experiencing reality. I could learn plenty secondhand, but nothing was ever to surpass the experiences I had in the wilderness. All my knowledge of social, scientific, and religious issues has been acquired through personal experience.”
