Mountain Highs
Laying Down Our Need for Things to be the Best Ever…and Uncovering the Unique Beauty in Everything Else
Sometime in the aughts, or the noughties, for my friends across the pond, I shared a brief conversation with someone that has stayed with me all this time. We were talking about his recent family trip to Wyoming and the experience of seeing the Grand Tetons for the first time.
For anyone else like me, blessed with living in the embrace of Mount Rainier, you know what kind of mark that mountain can leave on your psyche and on the shifting state of your heart. There is an almost alarming beauty to it, an unavoidable naked grandeur and power seeing it standing proudly everyday from sea level all the way up to nearly 15,000 feet. The rest of the Cascades, and the nearby Olympics, are also unforgettable and have a way of painting new colors on the landscape of your thought life. Still, I'd never made it to Wyoming to see another one of America's great mountain ranges. I'd viewed a lot of images and nature videos that highlighted that state and that range and always wanted to take the trip.
So, naturally, I was interested in hearing about his experience. I was expecting to get a rundown of the sites, the best trails or roads, the best camping, fishing, or photo opportunities, and a first-hand description of what it's like to just be near those peaks. Instead, he caught me with a left hook when he said something to the effect of..."Uh, it was no big deal. I mean, they're pretty, for sure. But it wasn't anything that special. I mean, we've got Rainier. We get to look at it everyday. It's such an amazing mountain and so high and huge. The Tetons really can't compete with that." I froze in disbelief, nodded that I'd heard him, said something he dismissed about it still being a stunning landscape, and went away dumbstruck at his commentary as he began talking with someone else.
As an aside, I love this man dearly, but the strangeness of the response got me thinking about several things. Namely, the way we value different experiences or people, our understanding of beauty and how we interpret this, and the ease with which we can close down the aperture we gaze through when looking at the world.
I understand that part of my reaction has to do with the differences in how individuals interpret experiences. And that is something inherent to each person, some of it, seemingly written from birth. Still, it had the sense of being a weirdly rigid notion of beauty, as if enormity was the only gauge for measuring it. As if intensity were the only parameter for personal experience.
The Grand Tetons aren't gorgeous and seeing them isn't a moving experience because they are the biggest mountains in America. They are beautiful because there are no others quite like them. Their shape, the sharpness of their skyward reach, the expanse of the broad valley below, the rivers and yellow grass plains leading up to their snowy doorsteps, the way a landscape like that can open new things inside each of us. These are all reasons to fall in love with a natural wonder. It's not merely because it stands the tallest or casts the longest shadow, but because it has something different to say, something to reveal about human existence and our relationship with beauty and wildness.
“Often, our desire for new experiences has less to do with wanting to learn and grow from them, and more to do with a short attention span and the need to find a measure of approval and acceptance from others. ”
Our time on earth leads us through a wildly varied and ever-changing hallway of experiences. Each one, offering a rotating menu of beauty, majesty, ecstasy, and knowledge, along with no lack of pain, loss, confusion, heartache, frustration, and unmet longing. In our age, there is, simultaneously, a pervasive low-level apathy stemming from our post-modern cynicism, and a rising boredom, an emotional burn-out fed by the intensity of our over-connected and media-obsessed culture. We are encouraged to see our lives as a contest for the best mountain-top photo opportunities. Often, our desire for new experiences has less to do with wanting to learn and grow from them, and more to do with a short attention span and the need to find a measure of approval and acceptance from others.
I don't want to travel to new places just to compare them to those I've already seen. I don't want to meet new people just to hold them up to a narrow standard or a model inspired by people I already know. The beauty of Hawaii is different from the beauty of the Olympic Mountains. The beauty of a rainforest or sub-alpine meadow, different from the beauty of a Mediterranean coastline. The stark and haunting expanse of a high desert, unique from the feeling you get from meandering through a small hamlet in the countryside.
Different landscapes not only cause us to feel different emotions, but to think different thoughts. Every environment has a way of stirring up certain memories, certain theories, different ways to view an idea or concept, and at times, an extra subconscious push toward mental pathways that lead to the knowledge we need to solve certain lingering problems in our life.
While some experiences are more immediately dramatic or arresting, qualities that our local Cascade Mountains have in abundance, I don't see these as inherently more valuable or worthy of my time. Every experience and every person holds doorways to revelation and understanding. And our willingness to dive into things we're not used to, even if they are profoundly different from what we've already experienced, can set the tone for our lives. It can govern how we use our time here and what we choose to pursue, build, and defend. I think even more important, is our ability to seek out and uncover the quiet wisdom and simple pleasures layered throughout seemingly commonplace experiences and daily interactions.
“It’s easy to grow jaded in this life. So much of our time here is marked by repetition and routine, and by a long line of disappointed expectations. It’s easy to miss the beauty right in front of us, which we do to our spouses, our children, our oldest friends all the time.”
I have several phenomenal friends, individuals I hold as some of life's greatest gifts, men and women as close as family. And while some are naturally closer to me than others, given the amount of time together, how much we've walked through side by side, the idiosyncrasies of our personalities, and the ways in which we interact, I don't place them in a lineup of most to least valued. I see each of them, along with the many acquaintances and professional colleagues I've had, as uniquely valuable, each one endowed with qualities, experiences, passions, and viewpoints, unique to them and worthy of my choice to engage and know.
It's easy to grow jaded in this life. So much of our time here is marked by repetition and routine, and by a long line of disappointed expectations. It's easy to miss the beauty right in front of us, which we do to our spouses, our children, our oldest friends all the time. It's not difficult in our age to turn everything into a cheapened system of emotional energy shot judgments or top-ten experiences. But everything isn't supposed to be the biggest, the bluest, the widest, the most delicious, the most orgasmic.
Many experiences, perhaps most, are meant to float in and catch our attention subtly, like the way we notice the sound of wind in the trees, how our wife's nose turns adorably when she laughs a certain way, or finally noticing that a certain friend or family member is a great deal more thoughtful and intelligent than we'd once believed. So much of the beauty around us is understated. These quiet spaces are often the deepest, the internal realms that run to the core and open things we'd not considered. Instead of calling out at the top of their lungs, they wash over us like a gentle rain, like the comfort we feel when we hear the sound of our children playing in the distance, slightly muffled and watery, as if listening to joy filtered through an ocean.
Our time here isn't just about the highest of highs or the coolest version of everything. In fact, most of the memorable or powerful experiences in my life weren't the ones I expected would be so. Those moments of unmatched ecstasy are more meaningful alongside the quiet revelations of more subtle beauties and the meals eaten on common days. And they are more memorable because of their rarity, and especially when we aren't trying to make everything in life a contest for the "best" and the "ultimate."
There is a lot more spiritual sustenance bound up in everything and in everyone than we allow ourselves to see. And we miss it while we're looking at something comfortable, or something that just shouts a lot louder. Quite surprisingly, that kind of psychological and spiritual fruit is offered freely to us everyday. We only have to choose to pick it from the tree and bite.
Let yourself see the many layers in your everyday experiences, those that you often look past. Allow yourself to enjoy an experience because it is unique and has something else to stir up in you, not because it is the greatest or the most intense version of something. Choose to learn from the depth in someone who doesn't immediately interest you, someone you might disagree with. You'll be surprised what you'll uncover.
Our life was never meant to be a top-ten list and a pursuit of perfect experiences. As if meeting people or exploring the world's great cities and great beaches could be reasonably summed up in a best-of countdown. With that mindset we only burn ourselves out and become dismissive and cynical, turning everything into a click-bait drug for our brain.
Life is a mysterious exploration of the unknown designed to upend our preconceptions and an invitation to connect with others who are equally as complex and layered as we are. Don't compare and exclude so much. Let the wind of changing experiences and quiet pleasures wash away the madness and pessimism of the world around you. You won't find a mental and emotional utopia, but you just might find out that life viewed this way is a great deal more interesting, and full of a kind of wisdom that you can only find hanging around the subtleties of life, in the places between the louder and larger moments.