Making Love Out of Mountains in Maine
I was a lot of things a year ago, but happy was not one of them. Not to say I was incapable of feeling happiness or pleasure, but was pretty miserable most of the time in between those fleeting moments. 2022 was a year of shamelessly searching for sustainable joy. The truth is that growth is not linear. You can fall back down a slippery slope pretty easily, especially an icy one like the cliffs I climbed with my loves in Acadia this Winter.
I´d like to address a popular fallacy about one of the most healing forces in the world, Love. ¨You have to love yourself before you can love someone else.” I might have actually been doomed if I believed that. We could argue on the well-intentioned adage or look more deeply at it, maybe even modify it into a more constructive form.
Self-love is like wearing armor that nourishes your soul. It is a highly fulfilling force but it does not come organically in abundance to all, and I´m not about to shame or invalidate any of us who are stuck somewhere in that journey. You can learn to love better with the help of others.
Diving head first into a high-commitment relationship is akin to our attempt to summit Precipice this year. We did the research, and each have an intermediate level of skills and hiking experience. We thought we had the right gear but found out quickly we had no idea what we had signed up for. This is not your average hike. To reach the peak of the infamous Precipice, you must not only be quite physically fit, enough to pull yourself by your hands over rocks with sparsely distributed iron rungs (if you´re lucky), but also be capable of doing so for at least an hour moving only steeply upward for one dastardly mile. Be sure to bring a worthy set of hiking boots and a trekking pole while you´re at it. The trailhead to Precipice isn’t even inside Acadia, so admission is free for the daring. Sometimes a winning attitude is all it takes. Others, you have to be brutally honest with yourself and your partner, and be willing to turn back. A quarter of the way up, each of us slipping a few times and starting to question our gear, we decided to make a plan and return next year.
So, Precipice Trail is now our metaphor for love. You can enter a relationship at any time and how you relate that person and yourself is bound to change as the relationship runs its course through each season. You will use your existing skills, and find out where your gaps are. You could choose ¨fake it til you make it¨ as another valid way to challenge yourself into new experiences. If that´s your path, you must also stay mindful that you´re gambling with extremely high stakes, risking serious injury or death. Alternatively, you could identify actions and tools that are required to make your relationship a success. Neither of us wanted to take on that mountain alone, though. Not to say it´s not possible, but the lesson here is to be open to meeting yourself where you´re at. And if you´re lucky enough to find love in yourself or a trail buddy, let it in. I hope to meet you lovers out on the trail.
