Tying my trail running shoes in the frosty morning, shivering a bit as my winter skin had not yet grown in, I donned some warm gloves, turned on the tunes, and set off up the hill. With the sun to my back and the golden canopy illuminated by the searing solar rays, I ran into another dimension, transported into a state of bliss that was geographically and metaphysically apart from the North Trail on which I had begun.
The incline did not trouble my legs nor my lungs as I ascended into a different spiritual plane, a quasi-hallucinatory state that required no substances to attain. Encountering an acquaintance on my journey brought me slightly back to the cold reality, but although I likely startled her and her dog in my speedy ecstasy, I was soon returned back to my own personal universe, a place of contemplation and epiphany, of joy and peace.
Like the leaves which guided my transcendence, I was in a transitory state. Certainties I believed long-settled had proven anything but, leaving me questioning my path and my sanity. Apparently deciduous rather than evergreen, these expectations reached their apotheosis, desiccated in grand splendor, and fell away. Ensconced as I was in nature’s grand shift into winter, it touched something deep within me. During the course of this one run, the hurt and fear and consternation that I had been carrying became devoid of mass and floated into the ether, dissipating as cosmic compost.
We strive for stasis and predictability, for comfort and routine, wish deeply to reduce and control the variables that affect our already precarious lives. It is a foolish endeavor — impermanence is the only permanent condition. It is more useful to welcome change, to acknowledge that it comes as frequently and as unpredictably as the seasons. Perhaps your best friend dies in a tragic accident or your work position is made redundant or the highest court rescinds decades-long precedent. These external inputs are hard to process and accept. But, in the larger scheme of this tenuous existence, these alterations in the fabric of our lives are miniscule, no matter how gargantuan they seem in the moment.
Rather than passively reacting to change, it is perhaps best to seek it actively, to get out from under that overbearing husband, to switch careers from something corporate to something that lights up your artistic side, to move to France. Fundamentally, there is nothing about your life and/or your family’s life that cannot be altered, reconfigured, rethought. While the ease of carrying out these transitions can be affected by one’s socioeconomic status, even the most destitute among humanity have some measure of control over the entropy to which they are subject.
Rigidity of perspective must give way to malleability, to a new way of seeing the same old things. In this ensuing week, I have repeatedly gazed at the outline of the Gore Range with such intensity that its serrated edges seem to be fixed in my vision. Previously just a background and a playground, these summits now literally stand for something else, their geologic structure rearranging itself daily, stoic testaments to the constant morphology that typifies life in this galaxy.
It is terrifying to not know what calamities may befall one on any given day. But, to look at the same problem from another angle is to see its commensurate solution. Each day that you awake, something astounding may await you. It could be something as mundane as a little less traffic, internet that doesn’t wonk out, or just a small smile from a stranger. But, it could equally be exhilarating – a new project, a powder day, a promotion, the discovery of an efficient process for cold fusion.
Living a scared life, a restrained life is to fail to see the point. Ebbs and flows will come, one must remain flexible, facile enough to absorb these swings, to keep positive when all seems lost, knowing that even the deepest grief can give way to a nascent joy, that the bottom is just a stop on the run back to the top, that descent is thrilling in its own right. There is a reason that it is called Fall.