Feel the burn: it sears throughout the body as your legs struggle against the gravity of the hill you climb. Each step you take against this adversary, brings you closer to the goal you set: the summit that beckons closer with every passing moment. Everything crystallizes into this moment.

In the world that people call real, platitudes such as “live in the moment” are spouted along with the latest diet advice or how to use retinol to fight aging. Such as platitudes go, it is more junk to consume to call yourself a full citizen without realizing the waste that you ingest. Sure: go try to live in the moment when the entire world of lists and lists for lists await you. You try to plan a business, and live in the moment. Nice silliness to make the time go by, living in the moment becomes some thing that goes on a to-do list for sometime later on when you have time to make a bucket list, if you ever get through the damn rush hour traffic that is real life.

This contemplation runs through your head from time to time in your climb, if you pay attention to your thoughts. Even here, in the great outdoors where your being a speck of dust never seemed so obvious, the habit of automatic pilot in your head loves to play clever tricks and games to keep itself occupied. Normally, when life seems such a crisis because the agenda of the world screams its dictates at you, the demands you call life become a trauma that you wish to avoid. Which is why you are here now, thumbing your nose at convention, at least for a short time.

But here, where the wind laughs at your folly, the sun plays tag by ducking in and out of clouds, and one tree after another sits by the side of the trail like passerby witnessing your coming and going, the importance behind your life is ripped away, showing you the silliness of the ego you rely on to get through everyday life.

So here, you focus your attention finely upon where your feet go, where you must go next. An elementary plan for a complicated brain that revels too much in its gigantic size. What the heck good is higher reasoning if you have to rely on migraine medicine to kick it back into size? The birds flying by you laugh: even they see the joke in this.

You plod forward. What you find good is that here, you see the effect of your progress almost immediately. You don’t move as you do in that other place. In that place, you do the same thing over and over again to attain some abstract ideal that may come, maybe not. Yet, you convince yourself it means something because they gave you a line about success in elementary school about hard work and my, what a good student you were back then.

Here, the summit comes closer to you and you see it. This is a goal worth achieving, so good to know it has drawn you to it so that you see you have some impact, somewhere. The burn you feel within yourself means something here. By accepting the challenge to the top, you have given homage to something deep in yourself that has remained inert until now. You wake up with each step even as you become more exhausted.

The summit is almost here.