Share the Climb and the Summit
I stood at the top of Cerro Chirripó and felt nothing.
I'd hiked since four in the morning. One of my friends had turned back at twelve thousand feet, tired of the thinner oxygen and worried we wouldn't make the view and get down before dark.
I went on without him. I made the view. I did not make it down before dark.
The summit was the kind people write home about. What I wanted, more than anything, was to turn to someone and say look.
There was no one to turn to.
I stood up there for quite some time.
Long enough for the wind to pick up. Long enough to notice that the thing sitting in my chest wasn't triumph. It was closer to a question.
I'd been shedding people for years. A fierce independence I'd come to mistake for character.
It had taken me to a lot of summits. They were all quiet in the same way.
I went to Central America alone. The Mountain West alone. The Southeast, here and there … all of it alone.
I told myself I was untethered. I told myself I was finding myself. I told myself I was collecting experiences, unburdened by other people's plans.
Some of it was true. The rest was a story I told to make the loneliness sound like freedom.
The solo project hadn't come from nowhere. I'd come out of school feeling different from my friends. They were still chasing the next bar, the next laugh, the next girl.
I'd done my share of that. Enough years of it in Montreal, where the drinking age is eighteen, to know what was at the bottom of the glass. Nothing.
So I started pulling inward. Reading more. Walking more. Asking the questions you're supposed to ask in your twenties.
Who am I? What do I want? What am I here for?
I read the Stoics. I read the Minimalists. I listened to a lot of Tim Ferriss. I read men who'd wandered the woods and men who'd sailed the world alone, and I underlined the parts that sounded like me. I learned a lot. Most of it about myself.
I don't regret that season. Everyone should have one. Know thyself, the old line goes, and the old line is right.
But nobody tells you the second half.
Once you know yourself, you have to do something with that self. And what I learned, slowly and against my will, is that the self isn't much use sitting alone on a mountaintop.
I had a stretch of one-night stands I want to say taught me something profound. They taught me that the high lasts about ninety seconds and the hollow that follows lasts considerably longer.
I pulled back from the friends who were still chasing it. Buried myself in books, workouts, trails, miles.
Solo, solo, solo.
Then, I met my wife.
Our first date ended on a dock in the Hampton Bays, the two of us telling each other things we hadn't told anyone. I'd gone in wanting one last date before I gave up on the whole project for a while. I came out understanding that I'd been wrong about what I was looking for.
I'd like to report that I was wise enough to recognize what was happening. I wasn't.
I fought it at first. The small surrenders of doing things her way, planning around someone else, letting another person's joy matter as much as my own.
The old armor doesn't come off easy. It just gets traded in.
What I got in the trade was someone to turn to and say look.
The travel, the views, the long meals, the strangers met on the road … all of it sweeter for being shared. It turns out that was the whole thing.
With my daughter, the lesson deepened. Watching her make her way in the world, I started to understand what my parents had quietly given up to raise me.
For a long time I thought a life lived for myself would be the freest one. It turned out to be the smallest.
The bigger life, the one I had been too proud and too scared to want, was the one lived for somebody else.
A wife. A daughter. A community.
A long table of people a twenty-four-year-old me would have called a distraction.
Whatever you build a life around … a marriage, a child, a neighborhood, a faith … the structure is the same.
You stop being the protagonist of a story only you can hear. You start being a character in something larger. For something larger.
Share the climb and the summit. Live outside yourself. Live for those you love.
Once you get over your self, you'll spend the rest of your life glad you did.