Each climb is a lesson

When you are in pain.

When you still have another 1,000 feet to climb.

When your breath is caught in your throat.

When your water bottle has run dry.

When all you have left is to keep pushing, keep struggling, keep pedaling up the hill.

So that you can sleep on a pad on the ground.

So you can add water to some instant mashed potatoes.

So you can try to stretch, to eat, to drink, to recover so you can do it again the next day.

You realize what you want because you want it, need it.

Or what you had thought you wanted, because you were supposed to want it, just like everyone else.

I keep thinking about how I want a family. How I want to have slow evenings playing the piano and making homemade ice cream. I want to find all the people in the hidden corners of the mountains and fields who haven’t been asked how they’re doing in a long time, to talk to them.

I don’t care if people think I’m important, or know who I am. I don’t care if they think I’m slow or fast. If they are impressed by me. I don’t care how many people read this blog as long as one person finds it, and that it matters to them.

I want to make people smile and feel important, to believe in themselves and others and what they are capable of. I want to read poetry and take naps in the park in the late afternoon and stay up all night writing the words I was struggling to grasp that I suddenly can’t get down fast enough.

I want to wander into a stranger’s house off the side of the road for a coffee, and hear about the best things that have ever happened to them. About all the things they hold most dear.

I want to sit at dinner with an elderly couple at risk of losing everything to disease, and bottle up the significance each moment and memory carries.

I want to put my fingers in the creek and feel the water rush past me, to remember that each moment is new, each moment is an opportunity. And that each moment is also so very fragile.

I am biking by so much each day. I am a stranger being welcomed into others’ lives for a brief moment, bearing witness to their grief, suffering, joy, accomplishments. It is perhaps the greatest honor of my life.

I am so small as I climb up each hill and go past each mountain. Sometimes I stop to recover, to talk to someone. Sometimes I don’t. Each time is a choice.

The landscape is so large I’ll never be able to touch it all. It’s overwhelming.

But some of it I will reach. Some people I will sit down with. Each mile is proof of what I’ve already done and learned, and how much still lies ahead. Of what my life can be if I choose to listen more than I speak, to take a leap of faith. Of who I can become if I simply make it to the next point.

The people I have met make me want more for myself, for my life, for the people around me. They give me hope. They make me want to keep climbing.