“Great things happen when men and mountains meet.” – William Blake
My daughter was looking in my drawer of kitchen accessories and asked about an open-ended tube I had in there. I explained it was a tube for mountain climbing so that you could fill it with something like hummus or peanut butter and then crimp the end to seal it up. They way you don’t have to carry more than you need. She asked, “Why not take the whole container of hummus?” And that sparked the muscle memory I have of loading a backpack for a 2 or 3 day climb and paring it down to just the essentials.
It seems to for every trip I’ve made an equipment list, packed more than necessary with me for the travel to the mountain and then at the base, sorted through to pack only what I need to feed me, keep me safe and warm and also my share of group gear for the team. It’s an art that I learned from experienced mountain guides and it very much affects how well the climb is going to go. Pack too much and you will wear yourself out on the lower reaches of the mountain getting to the first camp. And if you pack too little you will likely be uncomfortable or even worse, unsafe, on the upper part of the mountain when you need that extra layer or extra battery for your headlamp. If you forget to put in the group gear, you might just be the goat that didn’t bring the tent poles and jeopardized the trip for everyone. Many things can go wrong when packing. On one trip climbing some volcanoes in Mexico, a guy on the trip couldn’t find his Payday bar at a rest break. Then we stopped again at 16,000 feet on the side of the mountain waiting for the lead team to try to get some ice screws attached so we could cross an exposed part of the route and he found it in his boot.
Since I haven’t climbed any mountains since I got had kids, it’s been a least six years since I’ve done the packing but I still hold on to it as such a great metaphor for the journey through life. At some point, it helps if we empty out all that we are carrying in our pack and make sure we are ONLY carrying what feeds us and keeps us safe. If we carry too much baggage, like memories of all the times we’ve failed, it hampers our ability to go far. And if we carry too little, like not figuring out our patterns of picking unhealthy partners or friends, we expose ourselves to the same dangers again. If we don’t carry our share of the group gear, like concern for the health of the community and planet we live in/on, the whole enterprise could fail. And if we can’t find what we need, sometimes it helps to sit down, take off the pack and find out what is making our metaphorical boot so uncomfortable before we continue on.
I get a chill when I think of how edifying it is each time I try to explain something to my kids. Which is good because my daughter’s next question was, “Why do people climb mountains anyway?”
Surprised By Joy 