“If peace comes from seeing the whole, then misery stems from a loss of perspective.” – Mark Nepo

The year after I’d summitted Mt. Rainier for the first time with a guided group, my friends and I put together a team of four of us to make an attempt on our own without a guide. We left on a Friday afternoon, climbed three and a half hours to ascend about 3,500 feet in altitude and started to make our camp.

It was dark by this time and as we hurried around with our headlamps on, I went to pull the tent poles I was carrying out of my pack. One of the poles slipped from my hand and started to slide down the mountain. Panicked by my mistake, I leapt forward and fell on it before it could disappear out of the spotlight of my headlamp.

I was thinking about that pole as I hurried around making Christmas plans yesterday. In a season where it seems like there are a hundred things to do, some things can’t be dropped.

The slipperiest sometimes is the whole point in all we are celebrating. In my family, we celebrate the birth of Jesus and the promise that love, light and kindness spread generously can make a difference in this world. As we celebrate the delight of this year, we also recognize that there are many ways we can do it better next year.

On that climb twenty years ago, fortunately I caught that tent pole because without it, there wasn’t going to be a tent. At 9,000 feet of altitude on a dark night with a whole lot of mountain to search, we weren’t going to find it if it slipped out of sight. But with it, we went on to climb and summit the mountain safely with a warm, dry tent as our base.

I keep coming back to that story as a way to keep me centered this Christmas season. With the point of all we are celebrating in the spotlight, it gives us a solid base from which to attempt everything else we are doing.