Hiking as a Metaphor for Life in Seven Lessons

Hiking – a mindful, focused, present-oriented, small step activity.  I must be and do all of these as I put one foot in front of the other along the unpredictable terrain.  Especially on a steep ascent or steeply declining descent where I step with intention so my feet grip the earth, the mental concentration is intense.   I must remind myself to stop and look up at the surrounding beauty or I miss half the reason for hiking in this most breathtaking nature that has been presented to us.

When my mind is able to relax a bit and wander away from the immediacy of each step, I think about all the metaphors there is here for life itself.

• Small steps gets us where we’re going.  The persistent steps are what make the big difference.  They take us to great places.
• The fragility and unpredictability of life is out there with each step.  There could be a loose rock underfoot, a falling rock seemingly out of nowhere, a snow bridge that appears thick and sturdy and upon stepping cracks under our feet.  We all know life’s challenges oftentimes appear out of left field and they can hit hard.
• Stop to look up and see all that’s around us.  A wonderful excerpt from one of my favorite children’s book, The Phantom Tollbooth, portrays this beautifully:

“… as you know, the most important reason for going from one place to another is to see what’s in between, and they took great pleasure in doing just that.   Then one day someone discovered that if you walked as fast as possible and looked at nothing but your shoes you would arrive at your destination much more quickly.  Soon everyone was doing it.  They all rushed down the avenues and hurried along the boulevards seeing nothing of the wonders and beauties of their city as they went.”

“…No one paid any attention to how things looked, and as they moved faster and faster everything grew uglier and dirtier, and as everything grew uglier and dirtier they moved faster and faster, and at last a very strange thing began to happen.  Because nobody cared, the city began to disappear.  Day by day the buildings grew fainter and fainter, and the streets faded away, until at last it was entirely invisible.  There was nothing to see at all.”

• It’s often better not knowing the future, not knowing ahead of time what we’re going to be up against.  On one of our hikes, we ended up climbing 3500 feet.  If our guide had told us that before we started, we would’ve said, “no way, we can’t do that.”  If I would’ve known ahead of time that my daughter would be on a ventilator for three months and in the hospital for nine more months, I would’ve said, “I won’t be able to handle that; I won’t be able to be by her side and function for that long under such stress and anguish.”

And yet we do it.  We put one foot in front of the other and climb on, and carry on.  Our mind doesn’t have the chance (ahead of time) to warn us off by telling us, “no, no you won’t be able to do that.” And so we plow onward.  And we do it, huffing and puffing, with rest breaks as needed.

• We have so little control {in the externals of life}.   The forces of nature are strong.  We can control how we function and manage with what we have and are given.  We can make decisions to the best of our ability at the time.  The rest is left to the wind and to the forces that be.
• We’re not there till we’re there.  Just when I think I’m in the clear after a long and steep descent and am finally on level ground in the village, my slippery hiking shoe souls take me for a quick little slide on the flat and study pavement.
• There’s something way bigger than us out there.  Being surrounded by grandiose mountains is an amazing reminder that we inhabit a grand earth.   There’s a majesty of nature, higher power, God or whatever you choose to call it to be, that embraces us.  Let’s embrace it and each other with the beauty that is out there.

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A fall on a snow bridge as it cracked over a waterfall.