“I’d love to go to New Zealand, but I don’t know if my bank account will let me.”
Standing atop a northern mountain of the Appalachian Trail (AT), I watched as the Ranger’s eyes scanned the ridgeline. There was this… glint… to them; like there was some sort of calm aliveness stirring and settling with each breath she took.
Looking out across the many lakes, mountains, and swaths of green in between, her mouth pulled into a thin line. The corners flared upward for just a moment while she tilted her head to the side and let out a long, audible sigh. Shifting her weight from one foot to the other, she turned her head and met my gaze.
“Unfortunately, it might be time to get a different type of job” she said.
“Lol.”
A life you want sometimes means doing what you don’t.
There was a group of us up on that mountain. While dripping sweat in the summer heat, our voices bumped up the tempo a fair bit when talking about going swimming in that big lake wayyy over there. Once we’d made it all the way back down to the car, of course.
We were on a micro-adventure, as weekend warriors are particularly prone to go on, and our mid-morning hike led us to the summit of one of Maine’s High Peaks along the AT. It was right at the top that we encountered the bubbly Ranger from the U.S. Forest Service. Among the rocks beside her lay a big backpack and a small collection of supplies. But it was the bulky cast-iron skillet that caught my eye. You don’t see many of those at the top of a mountain; especially not a full-sized one like that.
The Ranger shared that a friend of hers would be passing through this section of the trail while thruhiking the AT, so she’d scurried up here at the ass-crack of dawn to make them some blueberry pancakes. They’d apparently met while thruhiking the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) a couple years prior and, in the time since, this Ranger had also thruhiked the Continental Divide Trail (CDT). After a small handful of us had been talking for a while, she also casually revealed that she’d been the one to both design and tattoo the artwork covering her arms and legs.
Damn, what a badass.
“So, what’s next?” I asked.
That’s when she’d responded without any hesitation about her hopes and dreams of journeying to New Zealand.
Retracing your steps can help.
I’ve been thinking about that interaction with the Ranger at the top of the mountain a lot since. I recognized the look in her eye and the resignation in her voice. It reminded me of… me.
Before we’d reached the summit, conversation had been popcorning between our group of six as we made our way along the rocky path. Topics ranged from epic tales of studying abroad in far-away-places during college to past jobs, and from previous chapters of life to questions about what we hoped lay ahead.
“Would you do it again?” a friend asked me before adding, “Would you ever consider going back?”
By then, we’d been talking about how I used to lead multi-week trips off in the mountains of the Rocky Mountain West. “I’m glad to have done it” I told her after a minute. “But no, I don’t think I’d go back to doing that now.”
I knew that would be my response before I’d said it, but I’m not sure I fully knew why until later.
Practicality only sounds good because we’re told it’s safe.
“If you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong.”
That’s something I used to tell my clients back when I was a snowboard instructor. I’d always add that “fun” didn’t mean “easy” and that, at the end of the day, learning to snowboard was really just about having something new to enjoy in life. Lately I’ve been wondering just where it was, exactly, that I stopped taking my own advice?
In a 2014 commencement address, Jim Carrey famously shared a life-lesson he learned from his dad. He talked about how his dad had discarded his dream of becoming a comedian in favor of getting a “safe” job as an accountant. Fast forward and he was let go from that job. After that, Jim’s family was plunged into a season of sizable financial instability. And still, of the many things he says he learned from his dad, Jim Carrey says the most notable was that “If you can fail at doing what you don’t want, you might as well take a chance at doing what you love.”
I used to believe he was right about that.
Audacity is only part of it.
On the hike down from that summit, our group spontaneously turned it into a trail run. After years of spending too much time sitting behind a computer, and far too little time dancing along mountaintops, I started to feel the corners of my mouth flare upward.
My eyes swept the expansiveness before us.
Talking about the various paths we used to walk is one thing; but feeling a part of yourself that walked them bolt upright and fill its lungs with a deep inhale? That’s quite another thing entirely. It’s both jarring and wonderful. Hopeful, even. An unexpected resurrection like that brings more than a little uncertainty. And at the same time, however, I felt oh-so-ecstatic to find that part of me alive and well.
It happened again at the end of our micro-adventure weekend, when we stopped by a bridge for a final swim in the lake before driving home to reality.
I was about two steps from the railing by the water when, in less than a second, all the confidence I had vanished. One step from needing to leap, the voice in my head picked then, of all moments, to chime in with a “hey, wait; are you sure you got this?”
Um, WHAT??
With the guardrail of the bridge right in front of my face, I found the wherewithal to mute that voice. I’d started second-guessing this front flip off the bridge and into the water below, but the milliseconds before swan-diving over the railing isn’t really when rethinking things is most helpful. Those have actually been the moments in life when stuff’s gone terribly wrong for me.
Wrong turns and detours are also part of it.
When I first saw that video of Jim Carrey’s commencement speech, it validated something within my internal compass that had always itched at the thought of spending 40 years at a 9-5. I’d been a restless kid with an appetite for a non-traditional, adventurous lifestyle. I’d dreamt of remote expeditions in the mountains and trips to exotic places around the world where my writing could shine a light on the many different approaches to a life well-lived. Maybe I could help to illuminate a path for those who, like me, didn’t know how to get where they felt compelled to go.
So off I went, with a foot in both camps, to pursue an extraordinary, yet practical, life.
The course I’d set for myself turned out to be really bumpy and unnecessarily difficult. Not like, “worthwhile” difficult, but like “caught in a washing machine of crashing waves in the surf break, unable to reach the calmer waters further out” difficult. I went from wilderness guide to writer, marketer, and enablement director. About 10 years after seeing that video of Jim Carrey talking about the lesson he learned from his dad, I got laid off from my stable 9-5 job in tech.
“So many of us choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality. What we really want seems impossibly out of reach and ridiculous to expect, so we never dare to ask the universe for it.”
— Jim Carrey
You’ll still have to wait for the pay-off.
Back on that bridge by the lake, I had a minor freakout while approaching my takeoff.
And I blatantly chose to ignore the thoughts of running through another safety-check. It was far too late... what foot am I planting before jumping? Should I touch my hands on the railing and push myself over? Thinking about things like that, at times like those, are the kinds of distractions that lead to real bad luck. Things like tripping, smacking your face on the edge while gliding past, or over-rotating and belly-flopping from far too high to walk away uninjured.
Nope.
Nope, nope, nope.
I remember one summer at my grandparents’ house, I’d decided I was going to teach myself to flip into the pool. I ate so much shit. My cousin, Chris, was going to learn with me, but after seeing how many belly/back-flops I endured and how red my skin was because of it, he decided against it. Then, a year or so later, I did the same thing with learning how to do “gainers” off the diving board at summer camp. Running off the board facing forward, but doing a backflip into the water, was hard as hell to get used to. It was also the funnest thing I’d ever figured out how to do.
At least I’m dry right now.
As I approached the railing, I thought of how my chances of slipping were much lower than if I’d already gone swimming before jumping... Not to mention, I’d done what I could to increase my luck: I’d counted out the paces, visualized which foot to plant (and where), and decided not to touch the railing to minimize anything from fucking with my rotation once airborne. So, already mid-stride across the double-yellow lines on the bridge, I told myself I was “clear.” It’s a habit I picked up cliff-jumping as a teenager at the quarries in Massachusetts when I’d damn near shit my pants getting ready to jump from 80 feet. Next thing I know, I’m watching the railing float by beneath me.
I see the lake and hold my arms out above my head, waiting.
Pressurized decision-making is required. So are the consequences that come with it.
People who believe they’re lucky tend to look for opportunities that could create the outcome they want, while those who describe themselves as unlucky look for reasons why they shouldn’t or couldn’t. I recently heard the hosts of the SOLVED podcast discuss the research behind that and it essentially boils down to “you find what you look for.”
I’d been surprised at first to learn that our perception of how lucky we are has far more to do with our own decision-making than anything else, but it makes a lot more sense to me after sitting with it.
If it helps, they used the Chinese Cosmic Trinity to explain it like this:
Three Types Of Luck
Heaven luck — the cards you’re born with that you have no control over.
Earth luck — the table you choose to sit at that you do have control over.
Human luck — the way you play the cards you’re dealt at the table you chose.
Going beyond practicality and audacity.
The idea of creating stability by embracing practicality sounds good.
It seems logical.
You know, it’s this rational mental-math you do when it comes to something like a job you hate but that pays well; do it long enough and it will afford you to do something else, right? That’s what I thought, too. As someone who takes small steps to reach big goals, I long believed in the practical path.
I guess, I just forgot that compounding interest works both ways.
Sure, working that good job that pays well might pay-off in the long run. But also, it might not. So, can’t the same be said for choosing to go after something you really want instead? Maybe. If “fun” doesn’t mean “easy,” couldn’t it also be true that “practical” doesn’t have to mean “dull?”
Seriously, what if following the path you want in life isn’t actually a matter of being practical or audacious… what if the distinction is actually about understanding risk instead? The more I’ve been thinking about this the more it feels like living the life you want is a matter of learning to take calculated risks instead of avoiding risk altogether.
Pull from your prior pathways.
Not yet.
I’m suspended in the air, somewhere between the bridge and the water, content to remain in the “before” of heading home for a moment longer.
Not yet.
I feel the familiar momentum of falling, slowly tipping forward with every inch.
Not yet.
The weightlessness feels sooo good. I really missed this. It’s been a while since jumping from height—either into water or snow—and I’m always blown away by how my heart stops thundering right before taking off.
Floating like this feels familiar.
NOW.
I crack a smile and start tucking my head to my chest. I feel my feet lift above where my head had been and look to spot the treeline as I come around. Untucking to slow my rotation, I hear that same voice in my head that’d been worried up on the bridge go “Heyyy, alright. Not bad!“ just as my feet slide into place below me.
Then I hit the water, exactly as planned.
You have to be willing to ask.
The thing about the path we choose for ourselves is that we always seem to find our way back to the one we really wanted. Or rather, it finds us again to ask if we’re sure. Those intersections also seem to routinely present us with “so, what’s next?”
When I worked at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, there was a poster in our employee locker room with a picture of a skier on it. And in big letters that stretched across the length of the frame, it read:
“College degree. Good job. Big house. We all make mistakes.”
Sure, maybe.
Maybe a big backpack, a small selection of supplies, and some blueberry pancakes on a mountaintop with a friend is all we really need. Or maybe it’s a new job that pays the bills but doesn’t include an expansive landscape. Perhaps one that means tucking away that calm aliveness that used to stir with each breath you took. And maybe—just maybe—when you feel caught between choosing practicality or audacity, it isn’t really about picking one or the other, anyway. So, what’s next?
What if you… ya know, just asked the universe for what you actually want?
No one else will do it for you.
What’s the risk?
onward.
If you enjoy reading my writing, I publish short reflections like this each day as part of my daily column, Kickturn.
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