When I hurt...I imagine the hurt I will be forced to endure. When I see beauty, I think of the countless wonders awaiting me. While I write this very entry...I drift away to the nights when this forum will be pen and ink, under the stars.

When I go to the post office, I have always this hope that I will find something I have ordered for the trail. When I go to the store, I find myself browsing through anything I can find that I might need, comparing weights, eyeballing this and musing on that. When I see food, I picture it's usefullness on the trail, balancing it's weight against it's caloric and carbohydric value. At work, when my hands are free and my mind is unoccupied, I am browing the websites, ebay, campmor, pcthiker and so many many others...so much so that when work must interlude I feel cheated.

I spend my weekends and my weeknights now doing something to prepare my body--ruck marching further and further, ascending to heaven on the stairclimber. In the last few days, I have been lifting weights everyday while my foot heals. 

So then...why? Why have I suddenly gained such a passion? How is that I have latched so fast to this ideal, this goal, this adventure? To what end do I seek to accomplish by all of this? What is it that drives me to such lengths that even this far out, I wonder that perhaps I am behind?

I haven't posted much of substance as of late. I've been tired, beating on my body to the point of exhaustion...tearing at my mind so that I reach the pinacle of concentration and consequently collapse into slumber. I simply haven't mustered the energy to draw it out...

But tonight I do. Tonight the question lept into my mind, unbidden, and it forces me to answer...why? Why the exhaustion, the pain, the endurance trials, the logistics of getting a ruck march AND a dive or two in on the same weekend?

The answer is very complicated to be honest. There are so many levels to this thing that to ignore any of them could feel to me, disasterous...and yet, at the same time, I feel I must...for my sanity if not yours. 

Right now it comes to me that all my life...no matter how hard I have tried or what lengths I have gone...I have never felt success. I have never felt completion. My life feels like it has been of a nomadic nature...always leaving before the chance to build sets in. I don't think as if my life has amounted to anything of worth. Sure...I've been places and done things I only dreamed of, or never even conceived...but it matters little in the scheme of it all. I've known the passionate love of true friendship and the glory of my nieces' birth and growth. I've read many of the greats and pondered on their words...people like Hemmingway, Joyce, Vonnegut, Hesse, Elliot, Sarte, Plato...and so many more I could rifle off pages of them. Surrounded by greatness...the greatness of the true love others have found. The greatness in mother ocean. The greatness in silent and unwavering faith...the greatness of a worthy life...I have never felt greatness in myself. I have never once felt like I have accomplished anything. I have served so many others and yet I have never truly served myself.

As I have grown older, I've felt a part of me dieing. I can't quite put my finger on just what that is. I probably couldn't explain it in mortal words even if I did know. All I know is that I miss...something. Damnit but it is just so...maddening. I am quite nearly physical ill thinking of it. It feels like I've lost my way...that something is...wrong. I don't understand what it is or how it is that I can even feel it's absence...I don't feel...centered.
Maybe I can find it again, out there...out in the mountains, on the trail. Maybe if I stay "out there" away from this mind numbing, thought stealing, soul leaching society long enough...maybe I can regain part of whatever it is that I have lost. Maybe I can regain that creative energy that used to lie within me...maybe whatever it is that I hurt for...maybe that's the secret to it all. 

What if I am dieing inside?

This is to be a celebration of Life, the bastion of freedom, currator of love, joy, and peace. This is to be my 40 days and 40 nights.

This feels as if this is to be my salvation and my rebirth.

So perhaps I am dieing inside. What if part of truly IS dieing inside...but that it's a part of me that NEEDS to die. Maybe it's the part I loathe, the cynical, semi manic depressive, unruly, uncaring, blind, pissed off, fearful part. Maybe I have been calloused far too long and it's started to twist inside me, dragging down all that could ever be beautiful in a person, in ME. I acknowledge that within each of us there will always be a part of all that...yet it is a poverbial spear in man's side...Maybe that spear is too deep in me...lodged in the wound even still. This journey shall then be my attempt to pull it free and bleed the demons of my soul.

This is more than just a jaunt in the sun. This will be an adventure where I expect to cry mud and to sweat blood. This will be a journey where I expect to break and to somehow continue. This will be a stretch of my life that will determine who I am...not just what I can do or what I have done.

I will prepare for close to a year still. I will be the strongest I can, mentally and physically...

and I will do something...wonderful. 

current mood:  determined
current music: _No Boundaries_  
 

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