The day I almost died

These are some older pictures, but I haven't shared it yet besides with the people who went with me. I made it to almost the top of a mountain in two days!

I wanted some adventure that weekend. In fact I was going to ask Kevin, Mr. Hardcore-in-shape, if he wanted to go for an extended hike in the afternoon. I am eating lunch when he comes over to me and asks if I'm up for a hiking overnight stay! How fantastic is this! I immediately agree and go to my room to pack and get ready.


After some delays, where Kevin took the longest to pack, we stopped to pick up a giant block of cheddar cheese from the cafeteria, numerous protein (and in my case, candy) bars, some supper for the road, along with four of those giant hiking backbacks filled to the top (with, in my case, much borrowed gear), we are off.

To a completely different destination than we had originally planned.
Plan A involved a couple-hour hike, riding a cable car across a river to hike another hour to cabins for the night.

Plan B involved us monkeying across the cable that held the car because we couldn't get keys to said cable car. In the dark, because we had taken too much time trying to find the keys.

Plan C involved us climbing up an entire mountain in the dark, aided by flashlights and headlamps, setting up tents (in what we discovered was a thin layer of snow!), and getting up to climb to the top the next day.


The overestimation of my physical ability pulled us down like the heavy bag on my back. Hannah offered to 'trade packs with me', which was generous considering she had no pack at the moment. She and Leah had split a bag so at any one point one person was burden-free. Even when I was unburdened, I was only keeping up to everyone else.

Leah also traded packs with me once, and Kevin constantly stopped to wait for me. After five hours of hiking in the dark and cycling the weightless pack throughout our group (with a bias towards me), we made it above the snow line.

This is at a time of year when there was no snow, so we ascended the seasons as we climbed the mountains.

This photo is what I woke up to the next morning. We took a few photos, ate breakfast, packed one bag to carry lunch and extra layers, and hit the trail again.

We hiked above the level of the lake, into what became alpine meadowland. They were so picturesque, slightly reminiscent of some scene in the European mountains. Maybe Heidi was around the bend.


Being a city child, of course I hadn't eaten enough at breakfast, so every step I took drained me of an already low reserve of energy. Sarah, sticking to my painfully slow pace, urged me to take it step by step, and encouraged me with the promise of food once we reached the top.


There we had a picnic. My mood was elevated, my body was reenergized, and I knew that there would be no more climbing up. I clambered down the mountain like a nimble little mountain goat - well not quite, but I can say I survived the Garibaldi Hike.

What's behind door number 3?

I'm seeing more and more lately that life is all about choices.


Choose who to be, decide if your mistakes are worth fixing, whether you want to be good at many things or focus on one or two areas, whether you'll develop your natural talents or spend your time on something else...




How you live your life: quiet, eventful, extravagant, simple, colourful, careful... What do you decide is so important to you that you will not compromise? Live in an apartment, with others, in a house that costs more money, in which neighbourhood and which city, in what country? Is your home a place to relax and unwind or motivate and stimlate?


With whom will you spend your time. Many acquantances, fewer friends, living alone or having a family. Are your friendships mutually beneficial? Will your people be the leeches who demand your time, attention, pity, or money, or will they be uplifting you with their thoughtfulness? Do you have enough time for yourself and for your friends??




.....I think a lot is determined by your willingness to make it work, whatever you choose.....


Man, there are some times that I still feel so much more like a young person, ignorant of the ways of the world

This link

How many souls wander without carrying their purpose? For without that vital piece, life can be a grueling trudge throught meaningless time. But finding it, finding one's purpose, can make you lighter than air. One has so much more energy from the start of every morning knowing that each action is one step towards their goal.


"I wish I had a purpose in life", I think to myself.


Immediately, I laugh. It's not something that someone comes to present to you, which you may choose to accept or not. The more deterministic would agree that they must make their place in the world, making the most of their natural abilities, while others argue that one's purpose must be found, discovered, and that it is such a natural fit with their talents that it must have been fated so.


Either way does take an amount of work, with the latter doing the work unconsciously. To improve oneself, push your talents and use discipline.... and just to find the right path to walk... takes so much. I am frustrated because I remain lost, wandering along the side of the path, and I cannot even see said path, much less the direction it takes.


And it takes a great amount of courage to face the whole of the self with the good and the bad, to lose oneself enough that you find your own way.

And end to it all (chaos or life?)

How much chaos is there in the world? Why??


Today, I see it that chaos is the result of mixing the important matters with the trivialities, giving them equal weight, confusing our minds and our souls.


In photography, a general rule is to keep the background simple, so that the viewer's eye can focus on the subject. Another rule is good composition: put your subject at one third of the way from the top/bottom and two sides. Repeating patterns lead the eye and are soothing, as nature is all about repeating patterns.


We don't live our lives on purpose, it seems. We don't take the time to examine them. We pile the events of our lives the way I pile items in my room because my mother doesn't want them throughout the house. We don't spend time building our lives. We don't have the chance to choose ourselves, to fix the flaws in the foundation on which we build our lives.


Again, in photography, framing is important: finding a natural frame in the picture makes it pop out, much the way a picture frame keeps a picture or work of art from being lost in the vast expanse of the wall on which it is hanging.

sea turtle in hawaiian waters

Everything in life worth experiencing has frames, or limits, of some kind: pieces of music have a start and an end, and only have a certain range; artists and hair stylists have only a certain amount of fine dexterity, time, and tools; paramedics, doctors, and nurses have a limited amount of money, ability, and time. Even our lives themselves: we start at birth and only live until we die. Immortality would not make us better, because with enough time, we could all paint Sistine Chapels, carve Davids, give all our hair for cancer, climb mount Everest if we wanted to. But they are special because the people who did them did so in a few years, rather than in a few centuries. What humans do with limits is the most beautiful thing about us. Wonderful, heartbreaking, and terrible, perhaps, but definitely the most beautiful.


Today I see how it could all work. If we stood back and framed our lives with care, the way a photographer carefully composes a shot--taking into consideration the light and the colors and the contrast, choosing which details to leave out, how to better feature the subject, the point of interest--our lives, our world would be so much better.

Meaning of life in the bottom of the glass

They're everywhere, those metaphors for life, but I love it when one really comes over and knocks me on the head with some relevance.

Sunday I decided to make my mom a smoothie. Smoothies are my thing, like the best food-ish stuff I can make (especially those tart raspberry ones!). So as I am making it, I decide to throw in a few ingredients that can't hurt. Like V8.

I've done this before, just a dash of V8 in a couple of litres of smoothie, can't taste a thing. I also decided to put in just a tiny bit of peanut butter, for some protein. Load up the frozen rasperries, mangoes, chocolate and regular soy juice, and we're ready to go!

Mixing

mixing

mixing...

Finally! All perfectly blended! Time for the taste test!

Well, as you probably have more common sense than I do, you predicted it tasted terrible. I kid you not. I put too much V8, and the peanut butter was not hiding its taste at all.

Moral of the story: never put peanut butter in a smoothie. (V8's okay in small amounts)


Seriously, though, looking back at my posts, a few days ago I was totally uncertain of what I was doing, if it was the right thing to do, if my current life was just a waste of time. But this disgusting smoothie showed me that after all the hard work and time spent on something, when you taste the fruit of your work, you definitely know if it's right or not.

Hopefully that's a dose of confidence. It is for me!
(Though now we're out of frozen fruit...)