Conquering the mountain
“It’s not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.” – Sir Edmund Hillary
People across time have tried to climb mountains, run marathons, and set audacious goals that involve pain and suffering. If you ever run long distances, this is what you hear: “I never want to go through this agony again.” “Why am I doing this to myself?” “At around 37 km, everything is just pure pain, and you just want to be done.”
And yet, people voluntarily sign up. The first thought that pops into my mind is, why? Why do we do something that regularly makes us so miserable? Better yet, aren’t we hedonistic creatures built to seek pleasure and minimize suffering and pain?
Regular people like us endure tedium to learn the guitar, who repeatedly fall off stair railings learning to skateboard, who go through the arduous mental labor required to solve a scientific problem, who agree to take a job managing other people (which is truly hard), or who start a business (which is insanely hard).
Some will say money and fame are motivators, but these don’t sustain. Extrinsic rewards can only take you so far.
Which brings me to the point of this essay. There is a point where greatness comes from. Not through impact-effort or cost-benefit. It’s through enchantment, awe, and curiosity. Some goal has grabbed them, set its hooks inside them, aroused some possibility, fired the imagination.
I grew up in a pragmatic, structured, safe, institutional, efficiency-maximizing frame-of-mind society. It’s my hard coding. Yet my dreams, with the right naivety, hooked me when I looked at people and thought, “I want to be like them.”
It’s what made me chase big impractical dreams I have had. All of them involved a fair bit of suffering, sacrifice, and a lot of questioning on why I am doing this.
The older I get, the more I can tune in to the voice of, “What am I being called upon to do here?”
Most of our great journeys begin with a surprise. Wonder, Descartes observed, “is a sudden surprise of the soul.”
I call it chasing ‘awe,’ and in these moments something momentous happens. It opens up possibilities, limits, and this is where you find your true ‘self,’ whatever that may be.
So how exactly does some fervent commitment grow, take over your life, and drive you to take on voluntary pain?
WIP
